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The mission of Athens City School is to be a progressive, high quality school system that connects the students and their families to a caring, traditional community. SPARK Academy is that mission in practice. Our school and our teaching is progressive and high-quality, but we strive to continually connect our students to our community, and the community to our students.

We began establishing these connections when the SPARK Academy transitioned to a whole-school STEM model rather than just a pilot program by creating our Community Advisory group. Made up of parents, teachers, administration, and members of the community at large, our advisory group began meeting in November of 2017.

We began with a session on vision casting, identifying what the advisory group felt were elements of an ideal school. We are very proud to say that many of the dreams from that initial meeting have been implemented since. The ideas from that meeting and subsequent meetings include:

• STEM books in the library
  • The library has transitioned to a Learning Lab, with many more STEM resources available for both students and teachers.
  • Books in the Learning Lab have been arranged by STEM topic
  • The Learning Lab also contains spaces for free exploration with STEM building materials.
  • Our media specialist organizes and facilitates Breakout Edu games and additional STEM lessons as requested by classroom teachers.
  • Our media specialist teaches basic coding to our kindergarteners, and green screen video production, animation, and advanced coding to our older students.
• STEM building materials available for outside/recess exploration
  • Our school purchased two sets of large Blue Blocks from Imagination Playground for outside use and two sets of medium Blue Blocks from Imagination Playground for inside use.
  • We currently have a rarely used classroom that stores the medium Blue Blocks and can be used by classes at any time for building and play with the medium blocks.
• Establishing a dedicated space for filming green screen videos
  • One of our available classrooms was converted for green screen filming, housing the hydroponics lab, and for storing math manipulatives, science, and engineering supplies.
• Establishing consistent communications between school and families
  • We publish our school Info Blast each Sunday on our social media accounts and through parent email.
    • https://www.smore.com/2fqwv-info-blast
  • Teachers publish weekly classroom newsletters on Seesaw
    • https://www.smore.com/xsgdv-ms-deal-s-kindergarten
    • https://www.smore.com/1zd42
• Creating opportunities for student leadership within the school
  • Third graders apply for and have various jobs around the school throughout the week
  • https://youtu.be/fVgAoJCxp1c
• Long-term information regarding grade level themes and field research trips
  • https://drive.google.com/open?id=1khDhMnGgc5sQUilNeZibptLCzxsikniSYxVPMAVxv2A
  • https://drive.google.com/open?id=10eoT_1QR0iTSCEitbQFE4KknwQwjJWEw5Qsqj0O775o
• Partnerships with local STEM businesses and organizations
  • Morrell Engineering sponsoring a STEM exploration day for our third grade students https://twitter.com/SPARK_STEM/status/1060890913952710658
• Establishing a career day experience, allowing local businesses to interact with our students
  • https://twitter.com/CoachMay643/status/1134268437436477440
  • https://twitter.com/SPARK_STEM/status/1133820089529249793
• Host community STEM events
  • 2018 Great American Eclipse viewing event
  • https://twitter.com/ChristyDeal1/status/89980628319649382
  • https://twitter.com/ChristyDeal1/status/899706782511222784
• Formal parent/teacher conferences
  • Establishment of SPARK Week, held in the fall, providing evening times for parents to schedule conferences with classroom teachers.
  • This year, SPARK Week conferences were hosted by each student, sharing their learning with his or her parent, with an opportunity for parents to speak with teachers in private if needed.

During the 2018-2019 school year, our Parent-Teacher Organization identified the courtyard outside of the Learning Lab as the focus for their fundraising and improvement efforts. SPARK’s Community Advisory Board, which includes members from Morrell Engineering, Hargrove Landscape Management, Friendship Church, Wallace State Community College, Community Action Partnership of North Alabama, SPARK parents, teachers, and administrators, worked as a team to devise a plan to renovate the courtyard. This renovation included installing a new sidewalk, drainage, dry creek bed, student seating, learning spaces, and landscaping. The SPARK stakeholders continue to be invested in improving our school grounds to enhance outdoor learning opportunities for our students.

During the summer of 2019, one of our Community Advisory members who own Hargrove Landscape Management, generously donated the labor for grading the courtyard to improve drainage and installed our dry creek bed, created our two pergolas and bridge, and installed plants and grass for the landscape.T he courtyard learning space was revealed to our school community on November 4, 2019.

SPARK Academy was fortunate enough to be designated as an Alabama Bicentennial School during the 2017-2018 school year. The success of SPARK Sprouts! relied heavily on input and involvement from the community. We consulted with and worked with a variety of community members at every phase of the project.

During Phase One of our project, we worked with Friendship United Methodist Church, Keep Athens-Limestone Beautiful (KALB), Lowe’s Home Improvement Center, and the Limestone County Master Gardeners Association to plan the design and construction of the garden itself. During Phase Two of our project, second grade students presented their learning to our community at both the KALB Earth Day & Outdoor Expo and at our school Showcase evening. They also consulted with Emily Clem of the Limestone County Master Gardeners Association to identify the best native plants to put in our pollination bed.

Lowe’s Home Improvement Center donated the materials for the beds, our storage shed, tools, an additional $500 for supplies, and provided volunteers for construction of the garden. With their volunteer program, Lowe’s compensates each of their employees for the time they devote to volunteer projects. SPARK’s volunteers, combined with Lowe’s workers were able to install our outdoor garden in five hours. Without Lowe’s donation of both supplies and volunteers, we would have not been able to install the outdoor gardens at all.

Lynne Hart of KALB was instrumental in establishing relationships with both Lowe’s and Friendship Church. As a member of Friendship Church, she coordinated volunteers from the church to plant seeds in the garden, assuring that the students had plants growing in the garden when they returned to school in late August. Friendship also provided additional landscaping complete with hostas, drainage rock, mulch, several drip hoses, and a water timer for the garden. Friendship Church volunteers returned to our school in July 2019 and upgraded the edging around the garden beds, extended the landscape plantings and mulch, and installed student-designed stepping stones around campus.

With the award of the Alabama Bicentennial School grant, SPARK Academy at Cowart was able to begin Phase Two of our project, bringing the gardens indoors to allow students the opportunity to grow plants year round. The grant allowed us to purchase two commercial hydroponic tower growing systems. Those, along with our existing two homemade towers and a dedicated hydroponics room in the school allowed our students to grow plants for the garden from seed along with growing and harvesting straight from the towers themselves.

Hydroponic gardening allows plants to grow without the use of soil. Our gardens are vertical growing towers, with seeds planted in rockwool. The water and fertilizer are delivered to the plants’ roots though a shower-like system inside the central tube of the tower, collecting in the tub at the bottom. We began using the hydroponic towers in January with first grade students growing kale and third grade students growing two different types of tomatoes. First grade students grew kale because kale salad is served every Tuesday in our lunchroom. The teachers agreed that it would be a good experience for the students to see the origins of the kale they ate every week. This allowed our first graders the chance to care for the plants, harvest and taste them, and share the harvest with the lunchroom and with their families at our Showcase evening.

Third grade students participated in the Tomatosphere project, where students around the country participate in a blind test growing two types of tomato plants, one control group and one set of seeds that had been exposed to microgravity aboard the International Space Station. Once students collected and reported their data back to the project, we were informed which packet of seeds was the control group and which was the experimental group. It was the responsibility of a select group of third grade students to care for and monitor the plants in the hydroponics lab.

Second grade used the plant lights in the hydroponics lab to grow Brassica plants for their study of pollination and the life cycle of a plant. During their investigation of the Brassica plant, our students learned the importance of pollinators to our food supply. The second graders partnered again with Lynne Hart of Keep Athens-Limestone Beautiful and presented their learning, along with pollination models and plants at the annual Earth Day & Outdoor Expo. Mrs. Hart was so impressed with our student presentations, she wrote an article for one of our local papers, highlighting what the students had learned. Our students also met with Master Gardener Emily Clem, who gave our students advice as to which native Alabama flowers should be planted in our outdoor pollinator garden.

Our kindergarten students spent a great deal of time in the gardens in the spring. They used the dormant beds to observe living and nonliving things and then went on to plant two different gardens based on the book Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens, in which a trickster hare convinces a lazy bear to share his garden by only taking the tops of some plants, like lettuce and broccoli, and the bottoms of other plants, like turnips and carrots. Each kindergarten class created a pallet garden outside their classroom where students planted and cared for “tops” plants like lettuce and tomatoes, and the students planted “bottoms” plants in their raised bed garden. Their “bottoms” garden included carrots, turnips, radishes, and potatoes. The radishes grown in the raised bed garden and the lettuce grown in the pallet garden were harvested and served in the lunchroom before school ended for the year. The remainder of the vegetables were harvested and eaten by our rising first graders in the fall.

We are very fortunate to be in partnership with Friendship United Methodist Church. Friendship often works “behind the scenes” in our school to the benefit of both our students and our faculty. Each year, our classroom teachers are adopted by church members, who provide STEM toys, learning sets, and building materials for use in the classroom by our students. Friendship also landscaped our front shade bed and helped install and improve our raised garden beds. Church members volunteer at our school as readers and in the lunchroom once a month to provide our faculty with a duty-free lunch period. They have remodeled classrooms, painted walls, volunteered at our field day, and helped fill our uniform closet. We are forever grateful for their support of our students.

Our challenge continues to be finding ways of connecting the STEM community to our school. We feel we have made great strides in working with local STEM partners, but we can always improve. We hope to find ways of connecting our high school engineering students with our elementary students to work together on a project. While we do an excellent job of bringing in expert speakers for our students, it would be ideal to create a project-long partnership, in which the experts could be consulted at various stages of the project and then asked to critique our students’ work once the project was complete. Those discussions will continue among our faculty, with plans made for implementation in coming school years.