Brad Paschal has spent his 13-year teaching career focusing on social studies and business at La Porte ISD's DeWalt School,a state certified Alternative Education Placement facility for high school students who prefer to be educated in a non-traditional high school setting. When developing his LPEF grant proposal, Paschal focused on a project that would allow every discipline in the school to contribute and work together on a real-world project.
“'Teaching and Uniting a School While Making a Golf Cart Cool'” is about getting the students attention and having a single high interest project that is used by all the classes taught at De Walt," explained Paschal. "This project will use the construction of an electric golf cart as a school-wide lesson, manipulative, project, school spirit builder and fund raiser. Each discipline will run tests, create formulas, improve on previously prepared documents, interact with companies and make assessments about the world of transportation."
With this grant, not only will Paschal, DeWalt students and faculty have a project for one year but he sees this as being an annual project with funds generated from the first golf cart used to pay for future projects. "The grant that we are working on is giving the students a real world product to focus on when they are learning and achieving in all disciplines," said Paschal. "The funding from the Foundation will allow De Walt to continue to repeat this project yearly and take it to a grander scale. My goal is that the project will become a self funding yearly event with the goal of increasing the educational opportunities it creates each year."
'Teaching and Uniting a School While Making a Golf Cart Cool' is not the first grant Paschal has received from LPEF as he and his colleague, art teacher Kathleen Restrepo, received a grant the first year that DeWalt was open. "The grant we received in 1999 combined my world history class and Kathleen's art class to show the uses and construction of medieval society," explained Paschal. "To this day, we continue to use books and other materials purchased with this grant."
