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K21 Health Foundation awarded Warsaw Community Schools two grants totaling nearly $400,000.
The announcements were made at the school board meeting Monday night.
The largest of the two is for $333,226 to assist in creating a stronger focus on fitness and wellness within the school district’s Student Activity Center, which is under construction.
A news release handed out after the meeting said the grant will “provide additional capability for this new space by allowing WCS to maximize the usage of the facility. This will be accomplished through the use of enhanced equipment, which will allow staff to smoothly transition between various sporting events and activities, which would otherwise be cumbersome and time consuming. “
The equipment includes gym-dividing curtains, suspended nets for volleyball and tennis as well as additional basketball hoops.
When the Student Activity Center was planned, WCS Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert said it was envisioned as “all-inclusive use, and how do we make sure that we create this facility that as many people as possible could be able to use it, and envisioning what that looks like in the future.”
He said K21 and its executive director, Rich Haddad, came along to help WCS envision that as well.
Krista Polston, WCS grants and special projects coordinator, said Haddad has been a great partner with WCS and “really embraced what this would look like” in making the Center accessible to lots of student, faculty and community groups.
“We felt like it was a big ask going into it, and we weren’t real sure the (K21) board would support that, but they were real excited at the opportunity it has on a large number of people and being able to purchase equipment that really expands the use of a building and makes it multi-purpose for lots of groups. We’re real excited to get this (grant) and we really appreciate all the support we got from Rich in writing this (grant),” Polston said.
Haddad told the school board, “We’re pleased to be a part of this.” He said the theme the K21 board “really grabbed onto was, how do we help the school system offer it for as many reasons as many times and simultaneously multiple things happening. And a lot of that is this equipment that the grant will go to help with, which is to be able to repurpose the same space for a lot of different activities, sports, and again things happening at the same time, but being able to section them off to be able to protect the different participants. This is the kind of high-tech equipment that I think will allow that building really to get the most use for the students, for the staff and for the community.”
He said the K21 board liked that the Student Activity Center would be able to be used by the community for healthy purposes.
“We’re pleased, proud, to have been asked,” he said.
Heather Reichenbach, school board president, thanked K21 for investing in the students and community.
The walls of the Student Activity Center go up next week, Hoffert said.
The second grant totals $56,840 and will assist elementary physical education teachers in giving every student “an opportunity to succeed through innovative, non-threatening physical activities, regardless of a student’s ability level,” a release states.
The grant will assist in encouraging and challenging students through inclusive activities that teach healthy lifestyle practices. This will include not only the purchase of new materials, which combine education with physical activity, but through an expansion on a prior project funded by K21.
Through the prior K21 grant awarded about two years ago, which was for about $36,000, WCS purchased four Drum Fit equipment sets to be shared among eight elementary schools in the district. The new K21 grant will provide each elementary school with a Drum Fit set, as well as Zoomer Scooterz, several different Nutri Play activity sets, anatomy activity sets and cross curricular parachutes.
Polston said the second grant started with P.E. teachers who had a dream of putting some new activities into place at all of the elementary schools. The grant for the first sets of Drum Fits came about two years ago, but sharing them among the eight elementaries didn’t allow each teacher to access them as much as they wanted. They wanted to expand the number of Drum Fits in the school corporation as well as be able to offer other activities.
She said teachers Scott Mehlberg, Harrison Elementary, and Sandy Monce, Jefferson Elementary, were the driving forces behind it.
Haddad credited Monce’s and Mehlberg’s passion and clarity in what they wanted to do leading to the awarding of the grant.
“One of the biggest things was the amount of inclusive participation that these new pieces of equipment will allow,” he said.
Mehlberg said, “This has been a real godsend from K21. The traditional sports, we’re not getting away from them, but we’re trying to get every kid moving and up and active. And, with the amount of equipment we needed to make this happen, the price has just been ridiculous, we’ve been trying to find different creative ways. (K21) has been a great partner with us the last couple of years to give us some of the things that we’ve always dreamed about.”
He said some students will never have the opportunity “to do some of these things unless we provide it for them and (K21 has) helped us get to that point, which we appreciate.”
Mehlberg also said P.E. teachers are always trying to find innovative ways to get kids moving and have fun with what they’re doing. Of the approximate 7,000 students in WCS, over 3,000 of them are in elementary school.
The school board invited the P.E. teachers to bring in and demonstrate the Drum Fit equipment at a future meeting.
Hoffert said when the equipment came in after the first grant two years, “We kept saying, ‘This is what re-envisioning what a physical education classroom looks like. It’s not kickball, dodgeball, the same it used to be. It’s all-inclusive and forward-thinking for all of our kids.’”
He said WCS was very grateful to K21 for the grants.
Two other news releases were issued Monday after the meeting concerning actions the board took.
The first was in regard to the board approving Todd Braddock as the assistant principal at Lakeview Middle School.
His tenure at LMS began in August 2011 when he began teaching seventh- and eighth-grade geography and U.S. history. Over the past seven years, he assisted in developing National History Day participation and curriculum, coached basketball and track and has been an active organizer in after-school events.
The other release was concerning WCS’s implementation of hand-held metal detectors. The state provided one device for every 250 students in school corporations at no cost to the districts.
The school board Monday approved the policies regarding the use of the metal detectors. Those policies and procedures will be sent to parents and students and outlined in the WCS student handbook, according to the release.
