Photo: Hayley Mignacca
Classrooms and student groups at nine public schools in Worcester will have access to unique educational resources this year thanks to mini-grants funded by the generosity of UMass Chan Medical School employees and students through the North Quadrant Support Services initiative.
Teachers at Grafton Street and Union Hill elementary schools said the grants will play a significant part in leveling the playing field for students in an economically disadvantaged community and will allow for experiential learning opportunities, which are crucial for young children’s hands-on learning.
Melissa Blanchette, a third-grade teacher at Grafton Street, received a mini-grant for her project “Hands on Learning Tools,” which will provide her students with various STEM tools for learning, including individual clocks, digital scales, wipe boards, liquid measurement tools and other resources for hands-on science and math learning.
Blanchette, who has been a Worcester Public Schools teacher for 14 years, said, “I'm really excited about these new math manipulatives and new tools into the classroom. Over the years, we haven't had the resources to replace some of our items that have been well loved. The grant is allowing us to replace these resources and add more of them and provide practical application skills.”
Robin McCann, a kindergarten teacher at Grafton Street, has been a teacher in the school system for nine years. The mini-grant will help bring some special visitors from Animal Adventures, an animal rescue zoo in Bolton, into McCann’s kindergarten classroom. The students will experience animals they wouldn’t normally be exposed to in their everyday lives.
Some of the animals that could be visiting Grafton Street this school year include an alligator, snake, hedgehog, bunnies and a variety of reptiles and lizards.
“Little kids learn best when they have something in front of them, when there’s an actual object they can see or touch or watch moving. If those are the most authentic ways to learn and the most effective ways to learn, then we want to get those opportunities to our students,” McCann said. “The program goes great with our learning about living things and animal habitats and aligns well with our kindergarten standards.”
Julia Simoneau, a special education teacher at Union Hill, received a grant that will impact up to 30 special education students in kindergarten through third grade this year.
Simoneau’s funded project, “Enrich Special Education Students' Learning with Multisensory Tools,” includes adaptive equipment and hands-on materials tailored to individual students’ needs, including students with number sense and comprehension challenges. She said more than 60 percent of her students are multilingual learners, and these tools will assist them with learning new skills.
Photo: Hayley Mignacca
“In my position, I mostly think about the individual students. These tools are for neurodiverse students. A neurodiverse child has a different way of processing the world around them, so these tools will help making learning more applicable to them so they can gain mastery of the skills,” Simoneau said.
More than $28,000 in grant funding from the UMass Chan North Quadrant Support Services initiative was awarded to 24 teachers and staff at North Quadrant schools in Worcester.
Funded projects at other schools across the quadrant include basketball hoops for the Belmont Street Community School playground, new science books and supplies at City View School, audio and editing equipment for the North High School student newspaper, a field trip to the Community Harvest Project’s farm in Grafton for students at Rice Square School, a 3D printer for Roosevelt School, and yearbooks for every student at Worcester East Middle School.
"These mini-grants will make a meaningful difference for students in our community by supporting innovative programs that otherwise would not be funded. The teachers put a great deal of thought and creativity into developing initiatives to enrich the classroom experience for their students,” said John Erwin, vice chancellor for government relations at UMass Chan.
The grants were funded by students, faculty and staff who directed their UMass Chan Cares charitable campaign donations to North Quadrant Support Services.
The 2025 UMass Chan Cares annual charitable giving campaign will launch on Monday, Oct. 27.
