Piper Middle School club wins $30k in local CIA competition
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — On Tuesday morning, students and teachers at a Kansas City, Kansas middle school learned one of their classrooms will be getting a multi-thousand-dollar upgrade next school year.
Jennifer Warneke and Tesa Davis, both teachers at Piper Middle School and sponsors of the Youth Leaders in Kansas (YLinK) Club, were awarded a $30,000 check for a makerspace — a designated area of a classroom used to help improve science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) education — alongside their students at a school-wide assembly.
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The teachers and all members of the YLinK Club — Lilly Dupree, Mckinley Baker, Nika Wells, Finley Bergin, Kinsley Coleman, Lillian Willmon and Stella Biondi — were surprised with the grant after applying to a local competition put on by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education and the CIA.
In order to win the grand prize in the CIA Mission Possible Makerspace Nation competition, students had to apply before March 1 and create a three-to-four-minute video creatively illustrating why the school needed the makerspace and how it could be used in the classroom.
And at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, the club members, Warneke and Davis found out their hard work paid off.
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“Our word that we try to embrace is the word ‘ignite,'” Principal Tim Leffert said. “We are trying to ignite their passion, and so when they go to high school and are asked to pick an academy, that’s kind of like a category for a future career.”
He continued saying, “So this makerspace is going to be essential to sort of do that explanation that’s really important, and making sure they kind of have an idea of what they want to do after they graduate high school.”
Piper Middle School is the second school in the Kansas City metro to win this CIA competition. Wesley Bryant, a 9th-grade physics teacher at Kipp Legacy High School in Kansas City, Missouri, won the grand prize in the competition last year.
