Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Magnet Mania: Jessica Fox, 9, Adrienne Harris, 9, and Alex Sasso, 10, all fourth-graders at St. Lucy Parish School, explore the properties of magnets in the school's new science building.
New science lab built at St. Lucy Parish School
By Amy Jenkins
For the past 10 years, teachers and staff at St. Lucy Parish School have had a dream for students to perform hands-on science experiments. The school will be 50 years old next year, and science had always been taught in regular classrooms. In 1992 the staff developed the concept of a new hands-on science laboratory for students, complete with microscopes, hot plates, sinks and workstations. But fundraising for the $400,000 building ended up taking much longer than planned and the building was not completed until last Jan. 25.
The new building will allow the students to perform dissections, says Bree Loughman, the science teacher for fourth through eighth grade. Last year she tried to have a dissection in a regular classroom but there were no sinks, so it was difficult to clean up.
"It was scary," Loughman says about the dissection experience. "I was concerned about safety issues. With the new building, we have emergency eyewash stations and lots of open space."
More space and electrical outlets have also allowed students to have aquariums in the classroom in order to learn about animals. The science room has several aquariums surrounding the perimeter, filled with bullfrogs, soft-shell turtles and lizards.
In the new science building, fourth-grader Alex Sasso, 10, enjoys learning about how magnets attract one another and how to grow crystals.
The eighth-grade class is using the new building to prepare for a science fair on May 29 in which they must invent a product that has a specific purpose. Amanda Moriarty, 14, and her group invented a device that alerts parents if a child is left in a car. A weight is engaged when a child is in a car seat, which triggers wires to light a bulb on the dashboard.
Moriarty's partner in the science project is Jeff Streit, who has learned about the changing properties of matter, thanks to the new science laboratory. In a recent experiment, he put sugar in a tube, held it over a candle and made caramel. Using fire was not permitted in the old classroom because there were no sinks and not enough space, he says. But with the use of the new freezer and hot plates, Loughman is able to show the changes of matter from solid to liquid to gas.
Money to build the science classroom came from a variety of sources. The school received an initial gift of $170,000 from an anonymous donor to start funding the building's construction. St. Lucy church raised $1.5 million for a new parish activity center and gave $50,000 to build the science classroom.
The school had a memorial brick fundraiser: for $225, a family could purchase a brick to be inscribed with their name, while corporations bought 20 bricks laid in front of the science classroom, paying $1,000 each. The total amount raised was $90,000, says the Saint Lucy Parish School principal, Sister Jolene M. Schmitz.
"I was surprised to see that once a goal has been identified, people really want to be part of it," Schmitz says.
A $10,000 grant from the Community Partners Program of the Wells Fargo Foundation paid for furniture in the new classroom. Another anonymous $5,000 grant will pay for 15 new microscopes. In preparation for the new room, the school purchased new science textbooks for kindergarten through eighth grade.
Once the school pays off the remaining $20,000 for the science laboratory, old classrooms will be refurbished with new paint, whiteboards and tile floors, Schmitz says.
The large science classroom was installed quickly because it is a manufactured building that came with a foundation and frames put together on-site. The building coordinates with the school's architecture, fit its budget and is not portable-looking, Schmitz says.
Campbell, California
