2023-2024 Interschool Mini Grant Awards

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BELMONT HILLS ELEMENTARY

• Vinetta Baselice’s Bulldog Friendship Club: PAWS - practicing awesome  ways to strategize provides the students with different (outstanding) abilities games to encourage  sensory integration and inclusion amongst peers. Total funding: $250 

• Lauren Hudson’s STEM-tastic Building Materials for Elementary  Engineers encourages elementary students to work together, plan, create and innovate during weekly  STEM classes and beyond. Total funding: $200 

• Kelsey DiMatteo’s Kindergarten Sensory Station engages students with  a variety of academic and sensory activities using a Color-Changing Light Table. Total funding: $536  

CYNWYD ELEMENTARY

• Rebecca Burns’ Ukuleles for elementary general music incorporates all the  elements of music including melody, rhythm, harmony, tone color, form and expression for third and  fourth graders. Total funding: $600  

GLADWYNE ELEMENTARY

• Riva Rothenberg’s Smart Space resembles a translucent wall with three  closed sides to help third-grade students feel private without keeping them out of sight of the teacher.  Total funding: $264  

• Lisa Unger’s Empower Students to Focus and Self-Regulate Via Movement  and Sensory Stimulation provides third graders with sensory tools in the classroom. Total funding: $138 

• Jenn Welby Gilbert’s Fine Motor Fixes in the Regular Education Classroom introduces items for second graders to improve their fine motor skills which appear impacted by COVID.  Total funding: $250 

MERION ELEMENTARY

• Alexis Vastardis’ Sensory & Self-Regulation provides proprioceptive, tactile,  auditory and social-emotional sensory and self-regulation items for the increasing number of Autistic  Support students. Total funding: $150 

• Alexis Vastardis’ Social-Emotional and Executive Functioning Skills Extension  supplies books and games to aid Autistic Support students to generalize learned skills across  environments. Total funding: $150 

PENN VALLEY ELEMENTARY

• Brittany Alburger’s Sensory Tiles help students in a Learning Support  classroom to calm down when feeling dysregulated. Total funding: $106  

• Lauren Seman’s Bikes for all adds an adapted tricycle to the Life Skills  classroom for students to develop gross motor skills. Total funding: $466 

• Sue McNally’s Lifting Spirits through ART: Collaborative Paintings for  permanent display within PW Elementary provides materials for the fourth graders to make large-scale  paintings that focus on positive images, words, and colors. Total funding: $400 

• Karen Cummings’ Friendship Library Book Bin addresses the need for  mentor text that supports the topics of being a friend, making friends and the value of being yourself.  Total funding: $160  

BALA CYNWYD MIDDLE

• Beth Pavletich’s Mozaic DEI merges the concepts of math with the art of  representing each child uniquely along the 6th grade hallway. Total funding: $275  

BLACK ROCK MIDDLE SCHOOL

• Lauren Lapinski’s Tech Ed - outdoor workspace design & construction provides students with the opportunity to design and build a functional, outdoor workspace. Total  funding: $828 

• Jackie Cassidy’s The Art and Science of Glassstarts a glass-fusing program  at the middle school level, where students will learn about glass fusing, slumping and casting. Total  funding: $600  

• Dr. Jessica Segal’s Building Best Buddies builds the bank of Best Buddies  materials that can be used to help club students connect with each other and engage in a more  meaningful way. Total funding: $500  

• Scott Kleiman’s Escape the Crate allows 8th-grade Leadership students  to put many of the learned skills, such as teamwork, communication, problem-solving, persistence, and  flexible thinking, into practice. Total funding: $460 

• Rachel Nichols’ Black Rock DEIB Student & Staff Antiracist Book Club systematically builds a more positive, inclusive community via iterative reading groups throughout the  school, starting with student/staff grade-level book clubs. Total funding: $400

• Mary Beth Kadyan’s Visual Fractions Measuring Practice incorporates  the use of fractional measuring sets to help students understand kitchen measurements and equivalents.  Total funding: $384

• Kathleen McNulty’s Improving AED Training for Responding to a Cardiac  Arrest collaborates with TSA students to engineer Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) training pads  at a lower cost. Total funding: $364 

• Jennifer Cornely’s Sensory Room for students allows students in the Life  Skills Support classroom to receive sensory input in a greater variety of ways during the school day. Total  funding: $200  

WELSH VALLEY MIDDLE

• Daniel Bluth’s Quiz Wizard Certamen Machine engages Latin students in  teamwork and competitive Latin trivia games among all three middle schools and other invited schools.  Total funding: $780 

• Lindsey Tifft’s Connected Cardboard City supplies microbits and cardboard for  students to create a cardboard city with a smart traffic light system. Total funding: $648 

• Sarah Brown’s Sensory and Self-Regulation Space introduces a Squeezer, which provides soothing deep pressure, for students with sensory needs to receive proprioceptive and  vestibular inputs to help self-regulate in between classes. Total funding: $590  

• Janet Chung’s Podcast Sound Studio supplies microphone isolation shields for  Challenge students to make better production-quality podcasts; in particular, entries for the NPR Podcast  Challenge. Total funding: $400  

• Katie Ziemba’s Strong Female Protagonists diversifies our classroom libraries  to include more novels featuring strong female protagonists and novels written by female authors. Total  funding: $400 

HARRITON HIGH

• Laura Hutelmyer’s Padcaster Studio provides access to video recording in a  professional format to students. Total funding: $900  

• Christine Kiley’s DNA Discovery supplies a more accurate visualization and hands-on  experience for students while discovering the structure of DNA. Total funding: $ 596  

LOWER MERION HIGH

• Meredith Dyson’s Think Globally; Read Locally develops a shared classroom  library for teachers of the Film and Literature course so that students can access high-interest books  (with film connections) written by local authors. Total funding: $618 

• Mikell Nigro’s Apartment Life Skills provides the apartment program students  with small appliances to work on functional skills in preparation for employment and independent living.  Total funding: $321