AUGUSTA — Augusta Independent School recently received a $15,000 grant that will allow upgrades to the school.
Superintendent Lisa McCane announced on Thursday during a board of education meeting that the district recently received a grant from the R.C. Durr Foundation.
McCane said that the grant will allow the district to update their computer lab into what she called a “21st century learning lab.”
“We are not replacing computers in the old lab, there are a couple of computers we’re replacing, we are just adding a lot of updated equipment,” she said.
Many of the upgrades made to the school’s computer lab will be in regards to the furniture and layout of the location, including some additional resources for education.
“It’s really the lab itself, as far as the room setup and the furniture so that it’s conducive to collaboration among students,” McCane said.
The lab itself will have a 65 inch interactive panel, McCane said, that will contain 70 interactive teaching widgets and learning tools to use.
Virtual reality equipment will also be employed, which will allow teachers to take their students on virtual reality field trips with Google Expeditions.
McCane added that video production equipment, which includes green screen technology, cameras, teleprompters and video editing software will also be included.
“I think this is perfectly aligned to students,” McCane said, “having more opportunities to excel in other activities like virtual reality and video production, which at this point many of our students haven’t had much exposure to.”
In other business, the board approved the report of a tentative budget by Finance Director Kelley Gamble.
According to the budget’s initial projections; total revenues is around $2.83 million with expenditures around $2.897 million within the general fund.
Among the expenditure amounts, funds have been budgeted toward a bathroom remodeling at the AIS central office, payments to the Mason County ATC, a school resource officer, increase in audit fees and increasing telecommunication costs.
For the special revenue fund, around $452,000 is budgeted, capital outlay fund will have $26,900, building fund is budgeted to have around $144,000 and the food service fund will have a contingency of about $32,000.
