Transition Learning Facilitator Dallas Kennedy hopes his Education Foundation grant will help students at the 18+ Transition Learning Center learn skills that will make them handier.
Kennedy was recently awarded a $1,700 grant from the Education Foundation called Sitting in Style! so students can learn how to build Leopold chairs.
“… We work with students that are aged 18 to 21. We are learning daily living skills, vocational skills, those kinds of skills so that our students can get ready for adulthood. I wrote a grant called Sitting in Style! We got $1,700 so that we could build what’s called Leopold benches. Our students will be going to Lowe’s and buying all the supplies and then we’ll be cutting the wood and making benches that they can use in in our school,” Kennedy said.
”They’ll also be able to use them at our … new outdoor classroom. … A couple of elementary schools that have outdoor classrooms have contacted me and asked if they could have some of the benches. We bought enough material to build 30 benches. We will use some at our school, but we’re also going to be able to bless some of the other schools in the district with some benches,” Kennedy added.
He said Leopold benches are very simple to build. Kennedy added that he got the idea from church camp where he learned to build them.
He said the benches will use very few pieces of wood and the students will lacquer them.
“… I went to a church camp at Circle Six … the Baptist encampment there. They had a father-son camp, and they had us build these Leopold benches there to help the camp. Me and my son built something together my son loved it and learned some skills that he could actually use,” Kennedy said.
That inspired him to take the idea back to the 18+ Transition Learning Center, so he wrote the grant.
“Woodworking skill is an excellent skill. It’s a skill that I do not have,” Kennedy said.
He added that about 40 students will participate in the project at some level.
This is Kennedy’s first Education Foundation grant.
“It was exciting,” he said of finding out he was an awardee. “I’ve I’ve written a few grants in my life, but I don’t get a whole lot of them funded so I was very excited to get that. I’ve had I’ve had some people in the community that have been very gracious with us, that have bought things for me and for my classroom. But to get a grant is very nice.”
Kennedy said he would encourage others to apply for Education Foundation grants.
“This is money that the Education Foundation is getting donated to them from community members. From my understanding, they want to give it out. They’ve got a lot of money and they want to give it out and teachers need to ask for it. Come up with some good ideas and get some money …,” Kennedy added.
A project like this is very important for students at the Transition Learning Center.
“We’re trying to teach them a broad range of skills. Learning skills like this can translate to be able to do their own home repairs, learning a little bit about woodworking, doing the measuring and cutting. These are skills that they could use in a worksite so I think these are these are skills that they can use in a lot of areas in life. It just makes you feel good when you’re sitting on something you built yourself. It just gives you some more pride …,” Kennedy said.
Although he wrote the grant, he said his students have had to go back and recheck prices.
“… They’ve had to go through through the Lowe’s website and recheck all the prices of all the supplies we had. This also helped our students learning the math skills and the shopping skills and things like that,” Kennedy said. “They’re pretty simple, but there’s still a lot of little bitty pieces you have to order. Our students are learning all the inventory skills from this, too,” Kennedy added.
Kennedy is in his fourth year at the Transition Learning Center and has seven years with Ector County ISD.
The Learning Center also is working on an outdoor classroom with a $5,000 grant from the Junior League of Odessa.
Special Ed Autism/Homebound/18+ Supervisor Micah Pettigrew said the Sitting in Style grant will benefit the students in multiple ways.
“The students are learning valuable skills such as using tools, measuring, building, etc. They are learning about taking ownership and pride in what (they) are building. One of the ways the benches will be used is for our outdoor classroom, so not only will they be building the benches, they will also get to see them put to good use. It is a win-win for our students and our campus,” Pettigrew said in an email.
