Wishlist grant gives PRLHS science program a boost

Priest River Lamanna High School students were facing doing their forensics and biology classwork by hand.

Thanks to a $5,144.85 Classroom Wishlist grant from Idaho Lottery, PRLHS students will have all of the supplies they need to do the class right.

The school's labs have been running off the fumes of previous years and PRLHS science teacher Kim Colombini said that the school was fast approaching a year with little to no labs in the science department. With a very tight budget, the PRLHS staff has gotten creative in finding materials to support the school's forestry, physical science, biology, chemistry, physics, anatomy physiology, and new forensic science class.

Last Wednesday, Colombini's wish for science supplies came true with Idaho Lottery officials delivering the much-needed supplies as part of its Classroom Wishlist program.

The Idaho Lottery was created to benefit public education in the state, spokesman David Workman said. Among its programs developed to support that mission is Classroom Wishlist, which awards $10,000 a month to teachers around the state who are working on creative classroom and education solutions.

Workman said Lottery officials were pleased that they could fulfill Colombini's wish.

“This means so much to us," Colombini said. "Without all of these hands-on materials, my students in forensics and biology would be doing their classwork with pencils and paper."

The grant allows Priest River Lamanna to "provide our students with real world, applicable, hands-on learning,” she told Lottery officials.

In her application for the Classroom Wishlist grant, Colombini told Lottery officials that when the district's $4.7 million levy failed, West Bonner lost $587,000 that had been allocated to the purchase of textbooks, staff training and most importantly learning materials.

Learning materials can come in many forms, she wrote in her grant. For PRLHS's science department, those materials consisted of all of consumables as well as general equipment replacement.

"Between forestry, physical science, biology, chemistry, physics, anatomy physiology and our new class forensic science things have been tight," she said. "Labs have been running off the fumes of previous years and we are fast approaching a year with little to no labs in the science department."

As a result, district staff are getting even more creative: Writing grants at every turn, asking local butchers for animal organs for dissections, asking local forest industries to donate both time and materials, and more.

Many of the items requested as part of the Classroom Wishlist program will benefit multiple classes and can be used in a multitude of ways, Colombini said in her application.

"With this wish list donation our science department will be able to provide our students with real world applicable hands-on learning," she said.

Animal hearts, brains, and other organs, as well as fetal pigs, will help anatomy physiology students learn organizational systems, something they spend eight class periods covering. By the end of each lab day, students can locate, identify and analyze how these organs work similarly to their own systems, she said.

"This is the best part of teaching this subject, getting to watch students make connections about themselves in relation to the world around them," she added.

Many of the other supplies — among them glue, fingerprinting brush, fingerprint ink/powder, rubbing alcohol, balloons, and fake blood — will be used to help students understand how criminologists collect and use evidence to identify and catch criminals. The supplies will be especially helpful for its forensics class students and its favorite holiday gingerbread crime scene reconstruction project.

Students research, and then recreate in gingerbread, a famous or infamous crime scene, working in connection with the art department, architecture class and others to create an edible crime scene.

"Students within our school vote for different categories on which creation is the best," Colombini said. "After we eat the crime scenes and analyze the importance of scale models in the crime scene world."

Other materials included in the Wishlist funding will help students with an entomology lesson, where students look at the timeline of decaying matter and how various species of bugs can help them identify both locations and when death may have occurred.

"We use leftover thanksgiving turkeys and put them in live traps around our school campus and then study the different species of bugs present at different times and locations," Colombini said. "This usually takes us a few weeks and gives students the perspective of the importance of time in decay."

Because the forensics class is relatively new, it is in the greatest need of supplies and materials. The Wishlist program will help biology students with new microscope slides that can be incorporated into the school's pre-existing bank of "interesting items" — which includes frog skin, basswood root, staphylococcus, and amphiuma liver slides.

"A lab that tends to stick in my sophomore student's memory is our collection and evaluation of our school pond," Colombini said. "We use gloves, syringes, and micropipettes to collect and look at the microorganisms living on campus. As you can see, not only do these supplies aid in educating our youth, they also contribute to the fun and entertainment of engaging and participating in school."

Created to benefit public education in the state, the Idaho Lottery has a variety of ways to support its mission, Workman told Bonner County school officials.

"Every year, we give back a truckload of money," Workman told officials during a Jan. 31 visit to Sandpoint High School. "This past year, it was $82 million to support education and facilities around the around the state of Idaho, including right here in town."