District receives grant to aid in distance learning | Palatka Daily News, Palatka, Florida

Putnam County School District students attend class last month via distance learning.
Positively Putnam FL

The Putnam County School District will receive more than $340,000 in a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to bolster distance-learning capabilities in middle schools.

Phil Leary, the agency’s Rural Development director for Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands, said the $340,465 grant is critical for rural communities’ education programs. Leary, a former Palatka city commissioner, said his agency hopes to continue expanding distance learning across the state.

The grant will launch the Better Educational Access for Middle Schools distance-learning project, which creates distance-learning hubs for science, technology, engineering and math at eight middle school classrooms.

The school district received about $300,000 in a similar grant last year. Leary said this year’s grant for Putnam County is part of $1.7 million the state was awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in telemedicine and education grants.

“It’s certainly going to help the school district with their distance-learning in middle school classrooms from around the county with respect to STEM programs,” Leary said. “I’m excited, being from Putnam County, that the school district was selected for a second year in a year.

Melissa Coleman, school district director of federal programs, said the grant pays for equipment in the classroom such as microphones, speakers, cameras and TVs.

Coleman said two science teachers at different schools could teach simultaneously. She said it was important to make students collaborating across classrooms feel like they are in the same classroom together.

Putnam County high schools already have the equipment. High school and middle school students could have distance learning classes taught to them at the same time thanks to the grant, Coleman said.

“It will have an amazing impact on our student data across the district,” Coleman said. “It’s an important initiative we put in place so that we can really provide analogous opportunities to students at various schools, allowing students to access programming they may not have access to.”

Superintendent Rick Surrency said he talked to the superintendents of other rural counties and teaching remotely could extend past county lines in the future.

“It is really unique for Putnam County because it allows us to have one teacher teach two or more classes at once,” Surrency said. “Especially in a spread out county like ours, it’s going to give us a lot of advantages and allow us to offer some programming we otherwise might not be able to offer.”