LOMS, RMS net funding for greenhouse renovations
By DEREK OPERLE doperle@paducahsun.com
View original at paducahsun.com
A pair of local middle schools received $15,000 to support greenhouse improvements and the further creation of outdoor learning spaces.
The two — Lone Oak Middle School and Reidland Middle School — are expected to split the award from the Bayer Fund’s America’s Farmers Grow Rural Education program down the middle for $7,500 apiece, LOMS principal Coye Elliott said.
“Whenever I was a teaching, I was an agriculture teacher and taught greenhouse classes so that’s something that’s near and dear to my heart,” Elliott told the Sun. “At the middle school level, a lot of times students don’t get to experience those types of classes until they get to the high school level.
“The more that you’re able to let kids experience those types of things, the better it is for them as they get older.”
The America’s Farmers Grow Rural Education program has awarded more than $57 million to rural schools across the country, including a $10,000 grant to Heath Middle last school year, and now $15,000 to LOMS and RMS.
Preexisting greenhouses are already in place at both RMS and LOMS, with Lone Oak’s having been built when Elliott was a teacher while the site served as Lone Oak High School.
Elliott’s main goal during this renovation process is to make the space and equipment movable so that it can come along to the new Lone Oak Middle School, which is currently being built, when the institution moves next year.
Though there is not an active greenhouse program at the institution, Elliott feels that having a renovated space and equipment could help facilitate one.
“What our hope is for this grant is to be able to utilize what we already have and add to, whether that be with educational-type hands-on projects or by looking at something different like fish tanks so we could do some aquaculture inside the greenhouse or putting funds towards vegetable production so that kids can go out and do those type of things,” Elliott said. “We can offer a program but if you don’t have that hands-on ability to get kids in there to work on and do things, you struggle to find that interest.
“When you can make things and kids can work in a different environment than your normal classroom, that’s when things like this can be successful, especially at the middle school level.”