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Olmsted Awards Making A Difference In Local SchoolsBy Patrick Ronan
iBerkshires Staff
02:02PM / Thursday, May 20, 2010
 Mount Greylock Regional teacher Rebecca Greene, left, won a Williams Bicentennial Olmsted Award for the second straight year.
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Principal Stephen Johnson wanted more crisis team training at the Williamstown Elementary School.
Thanks to the Williams Bicentennial Olmsted Award the school received last year, the faculty is now better equipped to handle the aftermath of a tragedy or trauma experienced by students. Maria Trozzi, director of the Good Grief Program at Boston Medical Center in Pittsfield, consulted the school's staff last summer on the most effective ways to manage a crisis in the presence of children.
"There are skills that teachers and professionals in a building need to have to react to a situation," Johnson said. "Lots of times schools don't plan for that. It was very important for Maria to talk to us about that when she came to work with our team. The teachers now have the skills and new ideas. If there's a lockdown, it's important to have something ready.
"We wouldn't have been able to do it without the grant."
On Thursday morning at the Williams College Faculty House, the 2010 grant recipients were revealed by college President Adam Falk, followed by testimonials from several of the 2009 recipients.
The local Olmsted Awards, which were established in 1993, disperses $5,000 to three schools — Mount Greylock Regional High School, McCann Technical School and WES. School faculty applies for financial support on a specific project, then the college chooses a select few.
Lisa Mendel, a business and art teacher at Mount Greylock, has one of the seven projects selected. With the grant money, she'll be attending the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Denver this summer. She'll be exposed to the most innovative computer software applications, and her goal is to integrate what she learns into the classrooms at Mount Greylock.
"I've tried for several years to get the grant, and finally this year I'm one of the lucky people to get it," Mendel said. "Computers in the classroom change so often with all the different programming. There's a lot of new technology kids are using today that we can use to keep them engaged in their learning."
The other 2010 award recipients at Mount Greylock were: Rebecca Greene (Environmental Education Program Development) and the team of Liza Barrett, Blair Dils and Sharon Dupee (Authors Conference for Students and Teachers). Greene also received a grant last year for her 10th grade lab science project.
Elementary school teachers Joelle Brookner (Math Professional Development) and Madeline Levy (Literary Team Liaison) received awards, while Erin Mucci (21st Century Learning Skills) and Matthew Barlin (AP Calculus) will share McCann's grant.
 McCann Tech teacher Kristin Steiner explains a classroom experiment, showing the differences between organic and inorganic sunscreens.
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McCann teachers Kristin Steiner and Lisa Biros attended a five-day graduate course at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst last summer, studying the many facets of nanotechnology. On Thursday, Steiner provided a slideshow presentation, detailing how she incorporated her findings into classroom exercises. The crowd of 40 in attendance, which included members of the Board of Selectmen, school superintendents and local educators, gazed at Steiner's slides like wide-eyed kids learning something for the very first time.
Falk, who on April 1 became the 17th president of Williams College, closed the awards breakfast with a speech.
"For those of us who have become educators, we're always reflecting back on our own experiences as students in elementary school and high school," he said. "The things that we really remember from these schools are a few teachers, the few teachers who made a particular impression on us." |
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