Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My incredible students are DYING to do high-level science experiments -- will you help motivate them to graduate from college to become doctors and research scientists? I am the science chair at our small, urban 6-12 school that is non-selective and 90+% low-income. I teach Living Environment, science electives, Chemistry, and I lead the high school science teaching teams. I am also in charge of starting a program that, by partnering with a science museum, a local college, and scientific mentors, will allow students to complete independent scientific research. This will enable them to enter (and win) the Intel Science Talent Search and receive college scholarships. Yes, this sounds incredible, but our students are so incredibly talented and curious that if their intellect is challenged & nurtured, they have the potential to attend and graduate from great colleges.

Our students are (intellectually) equipped to do high-level work in microbiology, chemistry, and genetics, but our laboratory is not. This is the first year we will have a 10th grade, so we do not yet have the supplies we need. We are a math and science themed school emphasizing inquiry-based lab projects. Our students are focused, mature, and intellectually ready for high-level science. I want to make certain that we can provide them with the type of learning environment that will continue their love for science, prepare them for a rigorous science track in college, and perhaps most importantly, give them experience performing experiments that will inspire them towards science careers. (N.B. -- most research companies pay high salaries for these positions and are in search of talented, ethnically diverse workers.)

Our students were highly engaged in our Living Environment curriculum this year due to the inquiry-based experiments we did. To continue to engage and challenge them, we are planning to begin doing many experiments using bacterial cultures in Living Environment, Chemistry, and an elective called "Microbiology & Public Health." To do many of the experiments, a Lab Incubator is needed to grow bacteria cultures at high temperatures. The specific incubator requested is important because it is large enough to hold 3+ classes of samples and reaches the 65°C temperature required for certain experiments.

Without hyperbole, your help in buying this incubator will have an incredible & indelible impact: in the short-term, it will be the technological catalyst that allows us to develop a ridiculously good high school science program; in the long-term, the resulting curriculum will be the impetus influencing our students to become doctors and research scientists, or perhaps even better, maybe they will return to their community as teachers and nurture the love of science in others. (By the way, as an example of what we do in class, the baby chicks in the picture were incubated & hatched in class to teach homeostasis, experimental design, evolution, embryology & cellular differentiation.) Again, if you help our students by donating for the Incubator, not only will you really help tons of kids, but I promise you will receive great pictures & letters from the students about their experiences in the lab. Thank You!