Mesa Public Schools has received a grant worth $900,000 over three years to train up to 24 teachers assigned to bioscience courses and to provide support for students researching the genome of a bacterium.

The Science Foundation Arizona grant will provide training for teachers at Mesa, Red Mountain, Mountain View, Westwood and Dobson high schools. Some teachers from other school districts will be allowed to take part.

The teachers will learn the technical skills and theoretical knowledge needed to guide students through biotechnology lab work.

Last year the school district, along with Mesa Community College and Arizona State University Polytechnic, received a National Science Foundation grant worth $900,000 over three years to create a biotech research project that stretches across all three education levels. Students are doing research on the genome of a bacterium.

But a problem arose: High school educators need training to teach biotech courses and oversee research, said Xan Simonson, the school district’s biotechnology director. That prompted Simonson, who also coordinates Mesa High’s Biotechnology Academy, to apply for the Science Foundation Arizona grant.

Beginning this fall, high school teachers will take college classes taught by an ASU Polytechnic professor on the Mesa High campus. The grant will also pay for a bioscience expert to help oversee biotech programs at high schools in Mesa and a lab at ASU Polytechnic available for high school teachers and students conducting research on the bacterium genome.

Seven Mesa teachers are also earning their master’s degrees in molecular biology through another grant that pays for them to take classes from NAU and receive lab training from the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix. Those teachers will also be encouraged to take the coursework taught by ASU Polytechnic at Mesa High, Simonson said.

Information from: www.azcentral.com

This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 10:01 am and is filed under College Grant. Tags: College, Education News, Grant, Student, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.