Staff photo / Dan Pompili Heather Belgin, left, vice president for the Boardman Schools Fund for Educational Excellence, stands with Attorney Tom Sanborn, representing the Seidel Trust, which made a $6,000 donation to the BSFEE on Wednesday. The BSFEE awarded more than $21,000 in grants to support teachers and students.

BOARDMAN — Public school teachers and coaches work within limited budgets and often cannot meet all the needs of their students.

The Boardman Schools Fund for Educational Excellence is one organization that gives them extra support so their students have more room to grow. On Wednesday, recipients of the foundation’s annual grant awards explained how they will use their share of more than $21,000.

“This gives teachers an innovative chance to teach their students with opportunities that might otherwise not be available to them and continue the tradition of excellent teaching in the Boardman school system,” said BSFEE President Matt Gambrel. “I’ve been doing this for six years now, and every year the board continues to be impressed by the dedication, creativity and the innovation behind these projects, and this year was no exception.”

The foundation awarded 11 separate grants for the 2024-25 school year.

• A $2,410 grant will fund phonics and reading centers for kindergarten classrooms at Stadium Drive Elementary. The centers will allow students to work independently while teachers work with other students in small groups.

l The art department at Boardman High School received $1,785 for a mat cutter and $840 for Wacom tablets. Kate Burnside, an art teacher, said the school’s students regularly submit art to county and statewide contests, and matting the art is required for submission. The three digital stylus tablets have pressure-sensitive pens for digital drawing. While they will largely be used by gifted and AP students, they will be available to all students who want to explore that medium.

• Fifth graders at Boardman Center Intermediate School will enjoy wobble chairs, specialized and differential seating, and better organization of reading materials with new book bins, thanks to a $2,000 grant.

• Artists at the junior high level will get some upgrades, too. The fund awarded $2,345 to support 3D printing projects and $2,240 for two new Canon cameras.

Students with special needs also will benefit from the awards.

• A $1,230 grant will be used to update the sensory room at BCIS to better accommodate the social and emotional needs of students who use it. At West Boulevard Elementary, students in kindergarten through third grade will benefit from sensory paths along the halls that allow them to take “brain breaks” or meet sensory movement needs, which help them return to class refocused. That project was supported by a roughly $1,990 award. And K-3 students with special sensory needs at Stadium Drive also will benefit thanks to a $500 award.

• Speaking of sensory matters, seventh- and eighth-grade students at Boardman Glenwood Junior High School will have some new tools for studying physics thanks to a $3,456 award for new data sensors.

“These are small cubes that record various points of data, such as altitude, air pressure, speed, time, temperature, and we’ve used these same probes for hundreds of labs,” said seventh-grade science teacher and science chair Eric Diefenderfer.

“Without these, the biggest limitation we saw when we did the same labs was that there’s a huge factor of human error in measurement of the different types of data we’re collecting,” he said. “That human error actually can affect the understanding of the concepts because the data isn’t truthful.”

There are three science classes in each grade, all of which will benefit from the sensors.

Diefenderfer has been teaching for 19 years, and for the past several has been largely successful in acquiring extra funds through BSFEE. In three of four years, he has obtained funding, totaling about $10,000. He also helps write grants for other departments like social studies.

“I can’t thank the committee enough for how generous they’ve been,” he said.

One nonacademic grant was awarded, and the recipients hope the equipment it funded will never be used.

Scott Lenhart and Tom Basista are cross-country coaches at Glenwood Junior High School. They received $2,458 for a portable automated electronic defibrillator.

“We’ve seen some things in the past. This last year, at one of the events, we had what we thought was a cardiac event. It was at the fairgrounds, and there was a scramble and no one had an AED immediately available,” Lenhart said. “That made us reflect on our own, how even at practice, and looking at the statistics that every minute that passes…you don’t want to get into that situation.”

Lenhart said data shows the percentage of people who survive cardiac events outside of a hospital is “very slim” because of a lack of access to AEDs.

He said the one they purchased could fit into the emergency backpack they always keep handy.

“Just the nature of the sport of cross country, if you’re on a two- or three-mile course, and you’re just so far away from a building that would be housing an AED, it seemed like a no-brainer to have one,” said Basista. “Hopefully we never need to use it, but it’s great that we have the opportunity to have one.”

The coaches said cardiac events among athletes are more common than many might think and there is no accounting for undiagnosed underlying conditions. Having an AED readily available could be the difference between life and death for a student-athlete.

“The heat indexes in September can be very high,” said Basista. “These kids are fighting for every spot at the end of a race, so you just never know what’s going to happen at that finish line.”

Heather Belgin, BSFEE vice president, said the fund that was founded in 2009 has since provided more than $150,000 in awards. The fund is supported heavily by an annual reverse raffle fundraiser event, which will be March 7 at Mr. Anthony’s.

The Boardman Education Association also supports the fund with an annual $2,000 donation. The fund also receives regular support from the Aimee and Lulu Seidel Trust, for which Gambrel is a trustee. On Wednesday, the Trust presented BSFEE with a check for $6,000.