The Vermillion School Board received a detailed report at its Aug. 12 meeting of grant funding that the Vermillion School District has recently received.
Curriculum Director Kim Johnson and Vermillion High School Principal Jon Frey shared information about the grants and how the funding will be used.
“We had a little bit of a teaser of this last month when we talked about it with some of our committees — that we had applied for some things — and at that point, we had had one of the awards, I think, confirmed by the last board meeting,” Superintendent Damon Alvey said. “Since then, we’ve had some other good news, and Jon and Kim have worked really hard with their team to write some things out.”
Late last June, the South Dakota Department of Education awarded 36 grants totaling $6.4 million to school districts to purchase innovative, industry-grade equipment for career and technical education (CTE) programs.
The Vermillion School District is a recipient of one of those grants totaling $219,618.
“The Department of Education announced a CTE innovative equipment grant opportunity that had a very quick turnaround,” Johnson said. “It was the last of some American Rescue Plan funds and so the timeline was very quick.”
The grant allows for infrastructure supports, facility supports for installation and integration and it did not have a matching funds factor, she said.
“It (the grant application deadline) was due mid-June and the announcement was made a few days later,” Johnson said. “We have to have everything here installed and ready by mid-September, so we’re on our way.
“We’re really excited about the almost $220,000 that this is bringing to our high school, primarily, but I think it will grow with field trip opportunities for other classes as well.”
According to a slide Johnson shared with the public and school board members, the grant will purchase:
• An Anatomage table – classroom bundle that will be used for courses in biology, anatomy/physiology, health science careers and medical terminology.
• A CNC Plasma Cutter and Updated Ventilation. This will be used for manufacturing, visual media and marketing courses.
• Laser Cutter & Engraver and Fume Extraction System for visual media & marketing and graphic design, and
• Welding Simulators for Intro to Technology and Manufacturing, and Welding I & II.
“What I’ve shared is not an exhaustive list, by any means,” Johnson said. “With the anatomage table, we requested the classroom bundle, which has the life size 3-D fully interactive anatomy suite.”
This 3-D technology will allow students to do a cadaver dissection and provides specific simulations of parts of the body.
“It’s using real gross anatomy of patients that has been incorporated in the system,” she said. “The classroom bundle also has tablets for the students in the classes, so they will be interacting with simulations and having some challenges to try and solve some medical mysteries of particular case studies and it will impact our science classes — our biology, our anatomy and physiology.”
Health Science Careers is a new course being offered by the school district this year “and we hope that it can be a big feature of that class, as well, and medical terminology, also,” Johnson said. “I do see it to have great potential for other courses as well and classes coming on field trips to see how it can operate for something they’re studying in science.”
A topic of the Family and Consumer Science class is birth and delivery. “This table also would show you the anatomical process of an actual delivery,” she said, “so they can see what’s happening inside the body as well, so it can bring some of that to life.
The Vermillion School District has received a CNC plasma cutter with a 5’ x 10’ table and updated ventilation for the high school’s welding lab.
“That has been delivered and is in the manufacturing space, but we know that that will also impact our visual media marketing classes as they create items to market, whether it’s yard signs for sports and things like that,” Johnson said.
She added that the school has received a laser cutter and engraver, and with that, a fume extraction system that will also impact the visual media marketing courses, potentially the graphic design courses and perhaps some other classes.
“We put in a request for two welding simulators and were granted both,” Johnson said. “We think it has a twofold benefit. It can be beneficial for reluctant students who are scared to start with that torch, but might be interested in a welding career and the skills involved in welding. It can be a less intimidating way for them to try that.
“And also, an experienced welding student can fine tune their craft because it will score their weld. It will tell them how to improve the quality of the weld,” she said, “so we see that really as having a twofold benefit.”
Johnson said it is hoped that female students will want to try the welding simulators in the district’s introduction to technology classes.
“We’re incredibly excited about the opportunity and what it will offer to our students and our teachers,” she said.
“It’s a very safe way for the students to kind of get a feel for what welding might be like and I think it’ll be something that will really prove to be a positive experience,” Frey said.
The school district has also received an ESEA Title I Grant in the amount of $422,021. This is a four year grant, with the school district receiving just over $100,000 annually.
It has three target areas:
Improve Graduation Rates/Dropout Prevention
• Implement a JAG (Jobs for America’s Graduates) Program at VHS
• Salary of JAG Specialist is grant funded for four years and picked up by the school district after that
Address literacy gaps across the curriculum
• Stipends for staff to take part in the SD Literacy Project via SD DoE
Address students who fall behind or disengage academically
• Train staff in effective Response to Intervention/Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (RTI/MTSS) methods and implement further supports for struggling students at VHS
“We became aware of these dollars right at about the same time as the innovative equipment grant in mid-April and we were told it would be a very quick timeline,” the high school principal said.
Frey said he and Johnson focused their energy into the applications for both the ESEA grant and the CTE grant.
“It just seemed like this was going to be an opportunity we didn’t want to pass up,” he said. “We had identified some areas of growth in our strategic plan that we felt were really necessary for us to hit on as a high school and what became clear in the way the state described this grant was it wanted to see you go after at least one of three target areas.
“We were told this grant would be funded at around $100,000 a year for four years if you qualify for the whole thing,” Frey said.
He told school board members that South Dakota is currently in its 15th year of participating in the national JAG program.
“By comparison … Iowa has been doing it for 25 years. I believe the high school I was at prior to coming to Vermillion High School had just started a JAG program in Nebraska. So, it’s not as far along in Nebraska as it is in Iowa, but I did feel like this is something that nationwide is in place,” Frey said. “It’s there to support students in high school who might be contemplating or might be considered at risk for dropping out or not finishing high school and we have been looking recently at a phenomenon that concerns us, and that is a dropping graduation rate.
“It isn’t falling like a rock by any means, but it is dropping and we want to see what we can do to help students make it to that finish line. What can we do to better support them before they get to a point where we can’t recover and we can’t get them through?” he said.
A JAG specialist would be part of this program.
“A JAG specialist does not have to be an individual with a teaching degree, but they will be responsible for two classrooms of students,” Frey said. “Our goal is to have a JAG specialist hired this semester so that we can start our JAG program in the second semester of this school year.”
The principal said the two classrooms likely would be made up of 15 students during the day — one with ninth and 10th grade students and one with 11th and 12th grade students.
“We might be looking at, perhaps, students who have moved around a lot and so they might be a little behind on credits,” he said. “They could be students who just are not connecting with school, having a hard time attending with any regularity, making the connections, not seeing the relevance of why they should finish school.”
A JAG specialist, Frey said, “is somebody who’s going to work very one-on-one with these kids; they’re going to spend part of their day in direct instruction with them. They’re going to spend another part of their day out in the community, interacting with business owners, with educational leaders, helping kids make connections with workplaces, making connections with educational opportunities and even recruiters.
“One of the important aspects of a JAG program is there is a year of follow up with every graduate from the JAG program,” he said. “If we graduate students in the spring of 2025 from our JAG program, our JAG instructor will remain in contact with those graduates throughout the next school year, making sure that they maintain employment or that they’re working on their educational goals, that we have a good handle on that group of kids and what’s coming next for them.”
Frey said the follow up aspect of the grant “amounted to 60% to 70% of what I figured the grant needed to be about for us. We put in that aspect of the grant to target graduation rates and dropout prevention.
“The second aspect of the grant addresses literacy gaps across the curriculum, just the things that we can do to help students reading and writing and how reading and writing do everything to bolster a student’s skills in all areas of the curriculum,” he said. “The South Dakota Department of Education has been offering a South Dakota literacy project available to South Dakota educators for free. It’s just something they have to do on their own time.”
The grant funding, he said, will help build incentives for school staff to take part in the literacy project.
“Over the course of the next four years, we’ve built in enough to provide a $1,000 stipend to each staff member at the high school to take this and complete the South Dakota literacy project,” Frey said. “It’s not a big stipend, but it’s a little carrot to encourage them to take part in this over the course of the next four years.
“The last aspect of this is to address students who struggle, who are not so much looking to drop out, but are really just struggling in the regular classroom. Maybe they’ve had attendance issues. Maybe they’re just not good at turning in their homework,” he said. “What we’d be looking at here is what can we do within the structure of our regular school day to provide interventions … what can we do to help intervene on behalf of helping that student learn better?”
Two terms that have become popular in the field of education in addressing this problem are RTI and MTSS. RTI stands for Response To Intervention. MTSS stands for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support.
“They’re functionally the same thing. What we’re looking at is a tiered process where, at a first level, all students would get those interventions,” Frey said. “These are the things we do to just help any student be effective in the classroom.”
First level actions could range from extending a deadline to giving a student a bit more time to work on an assignment to meeting individually with a teacher.
“Eighty percent of your students only need the first level, but another 10% or 15% of the students would need a level two, where they’re going to be a little more involved and receive a little more intensive support,” he said. “It might involve some scheduled meetings with a teacher before or after school, it might involve some additional work time with a tutor, something like that.”
Tier three, Frey said, is designed to help the 3% to 5% of students who really struggle in the classroom.
“What we’re going to try to do here is attend (workshops with) some nationally regarded trainers in the RTI, MTSS process,” he said, “and we’ll bring some of those trainers to us virtually or in person over the next four years to work with our staff in this area.”
Frey said the Thursday morning academic time that’s utilized at the high school currently is an RTI component.
“Over the years, one of the things that I’ve learned in going through RTI trainings is that the number one thing a lot of schools say that they have a hard time doing is finding time in the course of the regular school day to provide interventions to students,” he said. “One of the best things we have going right now is we’ve already got the time carved out. We’re going to utilize this aspect of the training to utilize it even better than what we’re currently doing.”
