CHARLOTTESVILLE (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — With class back in session in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, the Edgar and Eleanor Shannon Foundation for Excellence in Public Education announced the teachers who have been awarded its annual grants on Wednesday.
The grants, totaling $11,395, were awarded to five innovative projects that, according to the foundation, “provide students with fun, stimulating, hands-on opportunities to grow and learn.” Three of these projects were developed by teachers in Charlottesville, with the other two coming from ACPS.
While the grants are certainly a help to those who receive them, the foundation is quick to emphasize that the grants are designed to supplement public funding rather than replace it. By doing so, it allows teachers to create projects that can enhance the learning experience for their students.
“The schools are only able to fund so many things for every classroom,” Peggy Williams, the foundation’s president, told Cville Right Now. “Oftentimes the PTO or the school is able to fund certain basics, but if you want to do an extra creative project, you either have to fund it yourself or you have to look for other funding.”
The foundation was started in 1990 by University of Virginia President Emeritus Edgar Shannon and his wife, Eleanor. According to Jim Cooper, a founding board member of the foundation and friend of the Shannons, the couple were inspired by a relative who had started a similar foundation in Tupelo, Miss.
Seven years later, the foundation was renamed in the Shannons’ honor, just prior to Edgar’s death in 1997. Eleanor passed away a few years later in 2000. Cooper said he thinks the Shannons would be proud of the foundation’s work, as it’s awarded 598 grants totaling more than $550,000 over the course of its lifetime, according to its website.
One such recipient this year is Andrew Manning, a physics teacher at Charlottesville High School who received $3,473 for his project, “Seeing the Invisible: Bringing Particle Physics to Life through Cloud Chambers.
Manning told Cville Right Now the money will allow him to purchase cloud chambers, a device designed to cool down particles in order to detect radiation. He said he got the idea for the project from doing the experiment as a second year at UVa and thinks it will be valuable for his students to see as well.
“Between the curriculum we already have in the classroom, this is going to be a really help piece of equipment to actually show what atomic physics looks like and what radiation looks like,” he said.
Another recipient this year was Angie Foreman, the school librarian at Stone Robinson Elementary in Albemarle. She won $1,500 for her project, “Biography Bookologists,” with the possibility of the award rolling into a two-year grant.
The project’s goal is to replace the school’s outdated biographies, which are often used by students, with newer ones, using her 3rd-6th grade students as “book critics” to determine which books the school currently owns are worth keeping or replacing.
“I thought if students are doing the reviewing, making the recommendations, then they’re really invested and they’re going to have a lot of ownership in our library,” she said.
Foreman said without the grant, the library would’ve had to exhaust their entire budget for this type of project.
“It just really allows for a lot of innovation to happen in schools,” Foreman said, “and I think that’s the coolest part is taking it above and beyond our curriculum and really focusing on the innovative piece.”
Manning echoed that sentiment, praising the Shannon Foundation for lowering the barrier for access for these types of innovative projects.
“[The Foundation] really wanted to encourage these ideas,” he said of the application process, “especially in this day and age now where it is going to be a bit more difficult potentially to get funding for things like this. So having the Shannon Foundation supporting us has been a really big benefit.”
