Immigrant Kids need Lab Support for Sequencing DNA!
My students need lab services to sequence the genetic code of DNA samples they collect near school.
FULLY FUNDED! Mr. Finney's classroom raised $320
This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
I work with a talented group of recent immigrant students in an urban school district. Our school serves the needs of English language learners in a program that emphasizes simultaneous content-area learning and language acquisition through collaborative, hands-on projects. Every teacher in the school is responsible for helping these young people grow and become comfortable in the language of their adopted country, and our diversity ensures a rich and interesting learning environment. Our students arrive from some of the world's most troubled regions, and often have had little prior access to education. We strive to bring each of them up to state standards for on-time graduation, meeting the same requirements faced by their native-born peers.
My subject, biology, is often quite abstract to young people of any age, much less those from another country and culture. The processes under discussion are too small or happen on a time scale too unfamiliar to easily be communicated. The best tools to overcome the linguistic and conceptual gaps we face are those which put the kids' hands on the technology of the discipline itself. In order to teach kids from all over the world with differing schooling, language and cultural backgrounds about something as seemingly exotic as biotechnology, the best way is to get them involved in their own research projects.
Through strategic purchases, used equipment donations from universities and timely gifts from the public, we have been able to develop a strong biological sciences program over our first five years. We now have the capacity in a high school lab to extract and work with DNA from plants, animals and bacteria. The results bear out our methods. Our kids have successfully served as interns in research labs and enrolled and passed college-level courses through their own efforts and our support.
We are now at a point of requiring outside services to professionally process our DNA. Although we are able to collect, amplify and separate our DNA samples, there are few facilities capable of reading the actual sequences of base A-T-C-G building block. If we are able to get some help on this step, students will then be able to compare plant genes from several species of trees around the school. If successful, this effort would represent a novel scientific accomplishment, and a significant achievement for our kids. We have several such projects ready for implementation that are expected to yield compelling science fair and scholarship entries for a group of students from very modest backgrounds.
Your help in supporting our proposal will put the same tools found in college labs into the hands of deserving youth, creating new opportunities and unlocking an untapped potential for growing future scientists. Please support our dream of bringing real hands-on research to a diverse and deserving group of young people as they pursue their own American dream.
More than three‑quarters of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Finney and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
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