Photo Provided Rebecca Agostini, right, is one of three Harrison Hills City School District educators to receive a Best Practice Grant from the Jefferson County Educational Service Center. Presenting her award is Amber Fomenko, director of special education for the JCESC. Misty Barker and Susan Macenzak also received awards.

CADIZ — The Jefferson County Educational Service Center has awarded 2023 Best Practice Grants to forward-thinking teachers in the Harrison Hills City Schools District.

Educators Rebecca Agostini and Misty Barker of Harrison Central Elementary and Susan Macenzak of Harrison Central High School each gained $660 allocations to highlight STEM, social-emotional and physical science programs at their respective buildings. Amber Fomenko, JCESC director of special education, presented the awards during the regular Harrison Hills school board meeting on Nov. 16.

Agostini will implement “STEM: Incorporating Hands-On Learning and Critical Thinking in the Classroom” in the second phase of continued STEM and STEAM lessons. She plans to purchase STEM activities to motivate students to think outside the box, develop critical-thinking skills and incorporate other subjects such as mathematics and reading in the classroom. Among her ideas are to incorporate more centers, hands-on learning activities and creative thinking, and her 110 students would benefit by being actively engaged throughout their learning. Agostini also hopes that students who normally do not excel at paper-and-pencil learning will tremendously benefit from this format.

“The project will allow me to purchase coding activities, design building sets, brain-building activities and much more,” she said. “This project will benefit my students this year and hopefully for years to come.”

She is a previous grant recipient and was appreciative of JCESC for its generosity each year.

Barker hopes to meet students’ social and emotional needs through her project, “Social-Emotional Learning in Elementary Classrooms.” She plans to use social-emotional learning strategies and incorporate materials such as picture books to teach students how to deal with their emotions in the most constructive manner possible. Her vision is to form a calming corner in the classroom to refocus, as well as starting a lunch bunch for students who want to work on socialization skills throughout the school year. The project will support approximately 100 fifth-graders in her classroom but the resources may be utilized by other grade levels.

“These needs are often overlooked, yet they are vital to student success. My vision includes teaching students how to deal with their emotions in the most constructive manner possible; setting up a calming corner where my students are able to safely go to spend a brief amount of time getting refocused; and starting a lunch bunch for students to work on socialization skills,” she continued.

Barker was grateful to be selected a second time for the grant, saying it was amazing to have such resources available within the community to fund classroom projects.

Macenzak, a science teacher at Harrison Central High School, intends to enhance learning for freshmen with her project, “Using Motion Detectors to Graph Motion.”

“With this project, students will be able to act out different motions, and with the detectors they will see what the resulting position versus time graph, velocity versus time graph and acceleration versus time graph look like,” Macenczak said. “These sensors connect directly to the students’ Chromebooks to collect the data. They will also be able to make the connections with force and acceleration.”

The project will benefit about 100 current physical science students as well as physics pupils, plus it could help more classes in the future. Macenzak, a previous grant recipient, said she was excited to receive this year’s grant because she has another way for students to learn science and math by using real-life, hands-on activities to see results right away.

Meanwhile, JCESC Superintendent Chuck Kokiko said the purpose of the grants is to support teacher ingenuity and enhance learning opportunities for the students.

“Our schools have many great teachers with innovative lesson plans and instructional strategies, and we at JCESC are happy to be able to fund many of those ideas so they may become reality for the students in the classroom,” Kokiko said.

JCESC has disbursed more than two-dozen Best Practice Grants this year with other recipients at Buckeye Local, Edison Local, Indian Creek Local, Steubenville City, Toronto City and Southern Local School Districts and the Utica Shale Academy.