Our school is an academically successful, rural, high school that is filled to the brim with about 900 wonderful students. We serve our military community as well, pulling in students whose parents work at the USMC and Naval facilities at either Camp Lejeune, Cherry Point, Bogue Air Field, or the two Coast Guard stations.
In the state's ranking system, our high-performing high school has been ranked as a top ten public high school in NC for eleven consecutive years.
We are proud of our success in the classroom.
On September 13, 2018, our community was hit by Hurricane Florence. Although the hurricane might have re-shaped us, it won't define us. We are still in recovery mode. We were "CarteretStrong" then and my students remain that way now: strong, resilient, flexible, and hard-working.
Regardless, we are on a roll. We are luckily located by coastal waters and it's a perfect background to teach the Sciences for which I am honored to be the facilitator. For my students, there's always something to improve on, excite our class, and re-energize our learning.
My Project
In our high school, our STEM/STEAM materials and supplies are well taken care of, but they are put to hard use. That is especially true with our microscopes. When I first started this endeavor, I discovered 24 scopes that were over 20 years old for our entire school population. It was past time to get some new ones. In that old collection, only 4 of them had a working high-power focus objective. Thankfully, we now have 16 that are brand new as a result of recently funded projects on DonorsChoose.org. We are on our way to having a classroom set of microscopes!
In Science class, the small stuff matters - still!
We will use these scopes in a variety of ways. My Marine Science students use them for looking at sand samples, at oyster gills, and the tube feet of a starfish. In Earth Science, my students use them to look at the differences in the grain sizes of sediments, or the suspended debris in a water sample. In Biology, the list of uses of the scope is practically endless. Won't you help us see the small stuff? It matters!
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
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 Mrs. Sheila Moore and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
