Two JCCS Educators Receive STEM Grants

The Society for Science & the Public has announced $120,000 in grants to 35 science research teachers across the country to help them secure much-needed equipment and amenities for their classrooms. Two Jasper County Charter School teachers ScottiAnn Benton and Elizabeth Proctor were awarded grants.

To date, the Society has granted $340,000 to Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) teachers to help ensure that research opportunities and exposure to STEM fields are available for all students.

ScottiAnn Benton, a science teacher at Jasper County Middle School, received a $3,000 STEM research grant from the Society for Science & the Public to purchase equipment, such as a binocular microscope and digital incubator, for her classroom. Mrs. Benton realized her passion for middle school during her summer STEAM camp geared towards underserved middle school students.

There she realized that students were competing in science competitions at the elementary and high school level, but the pipeline, was broken for their middle school years. She set her mind to completing the pipeline by starting a research program at the middle school, partnering with high school science teacher Elizabeth Proctor to pair middle school students with high school students for mentoring. Through this grant she is setting up her middle school lab with the essentials for high quality student research projects.

“The room was filled with cheers, smiles, and hugs when my students found out we would soon have microscopes to view their water samples from the river, an incubator for their petri dishes growing bacteria from the school water fountains, probes to graph their vitals during and after sport practices, a refrigerator to store all of their samples, and much more!,” said Mrs. Benton.

Mrs. Proctor, the Society’s Lead Advocate and Jasper County High School teacher, received a $3,000 STEM research grant from the Society to purchase equipment, such as a spectrophotometer and accompanying accessories, for her classroom.

“For most of my teaching career, I spent years assigning experiments with known outcomes to prove concepts; however, in my twilight years of teaching I have become more daring,” she said. “ I now teach main concepts and allow students to prove concepts with their own experimentation. The results do not always prove the concepts, but the failures are great teaching moments. When students explain what they attempted and why they failed it is an A+ in my grade book. This research grant supports equipment purchases for collecting real world data which leads to authentic learning.”