Sisters schools land major grants

Sisters schools will get a bigger and better dose of instruction in history, thanks to a pair of recently awarded federal grants.

A $1 million grant awarded to the High Desert Educational Service District will provide professional development resources for teachers from elementary school through high school to improve their ability to create effective lesson plans and to differentiate instruction for all the students in their classrooms.

Sisters High School teacher Bill Rexford will be the grant director.

The first year of the five-year grant will focus on elementary school teachers throughout the region, offering them five workshops where they will work with historical issues, learning how best to create "historical inquiry" opportunities for their students and, as Rexford said, "leave with a lesson plan they can use in the classroom."

The initial focus will be on native cultures and the founding of the nation - areas of interest identified in a needs assessment.

Rexford noted that history instruction receives much less classroom time than English or Science or Mathematics, and many social studies teachers have very little - if any - background in history per se.

"I, myself, never took a history class in college," Rexford said. "I was a geography major. I didn't really start learning it until I started to teach it.

"Time and help is what the teachers asked for," Rexford said.

The grant provides for a $1,000 stipend for teachers completing 110 hours of professional development work.

Rexford said the opportunity is priceless for local teachers.

"This district doesn't have professional development dollars, or very few," he said.

The goal of the extra work is to make teachers more effective in the short time they have to impart a historical understanding to their students.

"They get one year of U.S. History (in high school) so we're going to make that year as good as possible," Rexford said.

Another grant will help local teachers and the Sisters Country Historical Society work together on a new project to make local history meaningful and accessible to students and the public.

Teachers Clay Warburton, Samra Spear, Gary Hedin, Bill Rexford, Peter Dempsey, Glen Herron and Garret Gladden are participating in a Teach American History Grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The purpose of the grant is to improve their teaching and historical content knowledge.

This spring the group participated in a weekend workshop in Southern Oregon. There will be two more workshops; one in Coos Bay and another here in the high desert. The program offers many activities, but one of the main outcomes is that each teacher is given limited funding to create a "history trunk" containing artifacts that promote excitement, interest and a desire for student inquiry.

The teachers of Sisters School District have decided to work together on their trunks, increasing the ability to share with other students and the community the artifacts, stories and facts gathered during the process of creating the trunks.

Jean Nave and John Hayes of the Sisters Country Historical Society are collaborating with the teachers. Teachers and students will tap their expertise and connections to help with the project. At this point the trunks will focus on the history of recreation in Sisters Country; specifically fishing, snow skiing and horseback riding.

Samra Spear, Sisters High School teacher said, "This, of course, will be used in our IEE class at the high school, where we teach local history and try to impart a 'sense of place' as an important part of our curriculum."

"We are always looking for effective ways to work with the schools and help students learn more about our local history," said John Hayes, president, Sisters Country Historical Society.

The public can contribute to this project by donating or loaning interesting historical items to the trunks. If you would like to donate or loan artifacts to this project, please contact Jean Nave at 549-8755. At this point storage space for artifacts is limited, so the group is creating a database of items and their location.