By Tracy Ouellette
Editor
The East Troy Community School District is one of 25 districts in the state to be awarded a Wisconsin’s Fabrication Laboratories Grant. The School District will receive $25,000 for its high school Fab Lab.
Gov. Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation recently announced the first recipients of the Wisconsin’s Fabrication Laboratories Grant Program. According to a press release from the governor’s office, the investment has the ability to fund new fabrication laboratory facilities, providing Wisconsin’s children with valuable job training and bringing them into the 21st Century’s global economy.
“Guaranteeing our students have the skills necessary to compete in our rapidly growing, technology-driven world is critical to our economy,” Walker said. “Fab Labs provide hands-on learning to the next generation of workers to provide our students with the skills they need to obtain good-paying jobs. This ensures everyone who wants a job in Wisconsin can find a job.”
East Troy’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction Daphne Kohnke said the money will be used to purchase teach pendants and textbooks for the high school’s new robotics program.
“The first year of the three-year proposal calls for 75 percent from the state with the School District providing the other 25 percent,” Kohnke said. “With the generous donation from Allan Integrated Control Systems, which will purchase the robot for the high school robotics course going toward our 25 percent, the grant from the state will allow us to buy five more teach pendants to be used by the students. The robot comes with one pendant and we had an additional five on our ‘wish list’ for the program, so now we can do that.”
Kohnke said the teach pendants will give more students the opportunity to simultaneously work with the robot.
“We’re also hoping to make the Fab Lab available to the community after we get it up and running, and have everything worked out, to give people the opportunity to take advantage of the robot and the equipment in the lab.”
Kohnke said the district is planning on writing grants for the next two years as part of the program, but at this point was unsure of exactly what they would be requesting funds for.
“We don’t know where we’ll go with this next year,” she said. “But it can go in the middle school or elementary schools, too, so there are a lot of options. But there’s no guarantee will get the money in future years either.”
Kohnke said receiving the grant was “exciting” for the district and would go a long way to into its workforce development initiatives.
“We’re doing something great in East Troy and WEDC has seen that and is supporting us to increase skills we have locally,” she said. “There’s such a need for skilled workers. This opens up a lot of doors for students with the Fab Lab, CNC machines, plasma engravers, and many more options for them.
“We’re one of the few districts that are looking at other paths for students instead of four-year college. This can help kids jumpstart to technical college. A lot of schools don’t have right now; we’ve got a good start on that. We can be a leader in the area for the students and the workforce.”
About the grant program
In the 2015-17 biennial budget, Walker implemented the Fab Labs Grant Program, making $500,000 available to school districts through WEDC. In response to an overwhelming number of applications, WEDC was able to leverage the flexibility of its program funding to move an additional $101,000 to the initiative, allowing awards up to $25,000 for 25 school districts.
WEDC’s Fab Labs Grant Program requires matching funds from each school district and is designed to prepare students for manufacturing jobs in the future. In addition, the awards support the purchase of Fab Lab equipment for instructional and educational purposes by elementary, middle, junior, or high school students.
WEDC received 90 applications representing more than $2 million in funding requests. All applications were competitively evaluated based on criteria that included evidence of long-range of planning, curriculum, partnerships, and financial need. The review committee consisted of experts from the Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Technical College System, and UW-Stout along with two WEDC team members.
Fab Labs have the potential to benefit individual students, school districts, and Wisconsin’s economy as a whole.
For more information, visit www.inwisconsin.com/fablabs.
