2021-2022 Spark Grants

This program builds a historical understanding of hair culture and teaches time management, preparation, basic hygiene etiquette, and experiential learning while being professionally taught and supervised with skill-based learning.

Hopkins High School, North Junior High, West Junior High — Paris Timmons

Gatewood Elementary is rapidly becoming a K-5 Outdoor Education School (check out their goats and their greenhouse), and this HEF grant is the perfect complement to their exciting endeavors. These 60 foldable camp chairs, to be built by the 4th grade students next fall, will be used outdoors for many, many years by ALL Gatewood students.

Gatewood Elementary — Tracey Beaverson, James Ikhaml & Keri Strusz

The materials purchased with this grant provide STEAM instruction, investigations, and studies of such topics as: inclined planes and simple machines, bridges, buildings, structures, and architecture, design, cause and effect, stability, weight, systems and parts and wholes, forces, motion, gravity, balance, speed, distance, and measurement.

Eisenhower Community School, Xinxing Academy, Juntos K-6 — Suzanne Bailey, Sarah Dallum

Math in Tanglen fifth grade classrooms (nearly 70 students) is going vertical. This HEF grant provides large, double sided white boards for an entire math class to use at once. The multiple 2’ x 4’ portable, nesting whiteboards can be slid around the room to offer enough space for each student to stand up as they work, and enables the teacher to see what everyone is working on.

Tanglen — Kim Rossow

This grant provides kits to enable online students to connect with their caretakers, family, culture and local culture while developing real life skills and work skills in food planning, prep and safety by utilizing scientific methods and oral, written and digital communication to validate and empower their cultural identity and self-sufficiency.

Hopkins Online Royal Academy K-12 — Sharon Meierhofer

The life cycle of butterflies is engaging 7th grade West Junior High students this spring. The Peterson and Wester Butterfly Project is an enrichment opportunity, part of a bigger project encompassing native plant gardens, climate initiative, composting, and bird observations at WJH.

West Junior High — Lindsey Leseman, Sami Peterson, Lauren Wester

The kits provided by this grant provide options for student exploration and learning related to geothermal, hydroelectric, and biofuel energy.

North and West Junior High Design Departments — Jeremy Reichel, Kurt Carlson, Brett Shand, Becky Jacobson, Frances Gibson

This grant provides a research-based family engagement program based on the landmark Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler Model of the Parental Involvement Process. The program is based on decades of research on increasing student achievement by increasing parental efficacy, knowledge, motivation, and confidence to partner with the school system.

Community Ed, Alice Smith Elementary, Gatewood Elementary — Chelsea Ritland, Alex Fisher

This grants provides 21 new pieces of music to support the flex-band concept in 7th grade, allowing for a wide variety of instruments, at a wide variety of levels playing the same piece of music in flexible groupings.

North and West Junior High Nora Tycast, Kelli Heckman

Innovation and illumination go hand in hand. Many students learn best visually, so this grant request from Special Education professionals funds innovative tools – portable light boxes and tabletop light boards – to enhance the learning experience for visually impaired children, as well as offering better accessibility to teaching materials for physically impaired students.

Special Education, Occupational Therapy — Malea Becker

This grants provides a jazz instructor from the MacPhail Center weekly for a school year to teach student musicians jazz ensemble skills, including Black American history, improvisation and performance practices.

Hopkins High School Band — Nora Tycast

First graders sometimes need to move their bodies while learning and some are simply more productive when they keep moving. This high-level need for movement is not ‘fixed’ by redirection or intermittent breaks for physical activity; in fact, these interventions can be interpreted by young children as negative feedback.

Eisenhower Juntos Spanish Immersion 1st Grade — Allyson Wolff

This Book of the Month Club is for all 850 Eisenhower K-6 students on the school’s three learning pathways: Community School, XinXing Academy and Juntos Spanish Immersion. It benefits the larger goal of fostering internationally minded young people who recognize the common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, and who help to create a better and more peaceful world.

Eisenhower Elementary — Jeff Shepherd

The materials purchased with this grant engage kindergarten students through enhanced literacy instruction that is more visual, more hands-on, more descriptive, more authentic. By integrating this literacy instruction throughout the school day in an authentic, experiential learning environment designed with students, students become the focus of learning.

Tanglen Elementary— Anne Baird

This grant provides Spanish literacy resources for our Juntos classrooms to strengthen our young scholars’ foundational literacy skills specific to Spanish.

Eisenhower — Edwing Llangari, Allyson Wolff

Two teachers new to North Junior High are energized to increase the selection of novels for their students to choose from. With this grant, the Language Arts department will purchase about 300 curricular-appropriate novels to engage students across multiple genres, topics, and reading levels, all designed to positively impact student engagement, self-confidence, and growth.

North Junior High — Marissa Thayer, Izzi Toso, Kim Busch

This pollinator garden/outdoor investigation lab will provide an excellent opportunity for students to observe and study native plants and animals within the four walls of the North Junior High building.

North Junior High — John Leaf, Jen Legatt

Two sound-proof glass booths in the Hopkins High School Media Center will be installed to offer private – yet supervised – space for students to conduct college interviews or visits, PSEO classes and/or presentations, virtual medical or therapy appointments, and quiet work spaces for test-make-ups, creating podcasts, etc.. There is simply not enough quiet space for all the demand for personalized learning, particularly space that can be supervised, unlike an empty classroom in the interior of the building.

HHS Media Center — Carol Tracy

This grant purchases ‘flash fiction’ anthologies – good writing with high rigor that can be consumed in a single sitting (one hour). It allows for personalized learning and engagement, choice of material reflective of many cultures, and skill development through small-group literary circles.

Hopkins High School — Beth Ocar

This grant provides materials to support a play-based learning environment to encourage children to develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

Meadowbrook Enrichment Program — Michelle Hetland, Kathleen Roller

This grant provides two pickleball courts with portable nets for use in PE education. In addition, staff can use the courts for a pickleball league after hours to build community.

Tanglen Elementary — Kim Rossow, Kevin Strong, Liz Patrick

The QSA (Queer Straight Alliance) at Eisenhower Elementary was founded by 5th and 6th grade students requesting a safe place to talk, to learn more about their community or about themselves, and to foster compassion and understanding. This HEF grant directly addresses a student-driven request for material in the school’s media center that respectfully represents all gender identities.

Eisenhower Elementary — Katrina Poplett, Amanda Windyk

Yes, Hopkins student, YOUR creative visions may someday become published works shared with the world! Need proof? Look no further than the impressive array of Royal Voices, a new special collection coming soon to the HHS Media Center, exclusively containing the published works of your Hopkins alumni. HEF is underwriting the creation of this collection to not only celebrate former students, but to offer current students inspiration across a variety of vocations, interests, pathways, and fields of study.

Hopkins High School — Rick Rexroth

The materials purchased with the grant are designed to train teachers how to use tools to aid in what they learn about how the brain learns to read. The long range goal is for all teachers a Glen Lake to know the science behind how students learn to read.

Glen Lake Elementary — Kathy Bouten

This grant provides spin boards and training for Occupational Therapists with the goal of assisting students with disregulation and taking “brain breaks” to enable them to learn at optimal levels.

All District Occupational Therapy — Alyssa Winterfeldt

This relatively small investment will reverberate for years to come, reaching Hopkins’ youngest learners (birth – age 5) and their families with the important work of understanding bias and teaching anti-racism. Doubling the reach of the very successful Fall 2020 HEF pilot grant, Becoming Anti-Racist and Authentically Inclusive in Early Childhood, this grant expands this work to ten classrooms at Harley Hopkins Family Center.

Early Childhood Programs — Sara Chovan

The LTL (Links to Learning) Compass Program, in which students receive highly specialized instruction, has grown over the past several years. Many participants have Autism Spectrum Disorder or developmental cognitive delays, both of which prevent them from participating in traditional vocational programs. The TEACCH Model kits that HEF is funding are a set of 37 durable projects.

Grades 9-12 Special Education — Judy Griffin, Lori Komoto