Congratulations to the 2024/2025 Touchstone Energy Classroom Empowerment Grant Winners!

There's a lot of great teachers in our community doing new and innovative projects in their classrooms, and we are honored to be a part of it!  Congratulations to this year's Touchstone Energy Classroom Empowerment Grant Winners! 

Marie Moore - Nashville Grade School 
Marie is going to use her grant to expand the Classroom Makerspace for her 7th and 8th-grade students by adding structure-building kits to the space. 

Nealy Hamson - Mt. Vernon Township High School 
Nealy used her grant to support the Jefferson County CEO Program for young entrepreneurs. 

Stacie Goodheart, Christina Merrell, Denae Jones, and Stephanie Rains -  Dr. Nick Osborne Primary Center 
The PBIS Tier 1 Team will use their grant for their Positive Behavior Incentives and Supports Store at the school to foster a positive learning environment. Students earn points for demonstrating positive behavior and get points to shop at the store for things such as school supplies, water bottles, books, board games, and toys.

Andrew Johnson - Salem Community High School 
Andrew grants funds will be used to purchase a 3D printer and energy consumption device, enabling the testing and comparison of energy consumption between newer and older 3D printing technologies. Additionally, the project will examine the VOC output captured by microfilters to assess the environmental impact and efficiency differences between the two printers.

Linda Klingenberg - Nashville Grade School 
Linda will use her grant to purchase Sphero Mini Robots that can be programmed using an app on school iPads.  This will teach coding, critical thinking, and problem-solving. 

Sarah Maschhoff - Okawville Grade School
Sarah's classroom grant will purchase supplies for students to design a wind turbine to utilize the power of wind and convert it to electricity.  This will teach wind power, energy, mechanical advantage, torque, work, and other scientific concepts in a fun and hands-on way. 

Ranzie Callahan - Bethel Grade School 
Ranzie will use her classroom grant to purchase Decodables.  Decodable readers are controlled texts that include a variety of words with specific phonics skills. Ranzie will be able to upgrade from printable black-and-white readers to colorful readers with more engaging content so that the students will look forward to reading. 

Lee Ann Ferrell - Coram Deo Classical School 
Lee Ann will use her classroom grant to purchase a scholar bowl buzzer system that will enable their team to host scholar bowl matches at their school.

We love what you are doing out there, teachers!  Thanks for making learning fun.  It's not an easy job but you go out of your way to make it count!  We see you, teachers!  Keep up the amazing work, and thanks for letting us be a small part of it.