Northern Maine school districts will have access to advanced distance learning and telemedicine technologies with the help of a $1 million U.S. Department of Agriculture Distance Learning and Telemedicine grant awarded this week.
The funding will help northern Maine students at 12 sites in Aroostook, Penobscot and Washington counties tap into the internet to improve education and health care, according to the USDA.
The grant will allow the schools in the Southern Aroostook Area Regional Service Center, which jointly applied for the grant, to invest in infrastructure and equipment, and increase services and education, RSU 29 Superintendent Joe Fagnant told the Bangor Daily News.
“This is a great opportunity to bring federal funds to our region to help schools thrive and meet the needs of the ever changing field of technology,” Fagnant said Monday.
The school districts include RSU 29 in Houlton, MSAD 70 in Hodgdon, RSU 50 in Southern Aroostook, RSU 84 in East Grand, RSU 89 in Katahdin and Region Two Career and Technology Education School in Houlton.
The schools learned of the grant in November, and John Butera, USDA Rural Development Maine state director, visited Houlton Middle High School Monday to present the award.
“When rural students are given the tools they need to learn and succeed, they carry that success back home into the local workforce, to their families and the community,” Butera said during the presentation.
As school budgets are increasingly constrained, administrators must aggressively seek options for revenue or grants to help upgrade equipment and networks, Fagnant said.
The federal investment will be used to equip the schools with networking equipment, interactive whiteboards, simulators and laptops. Individual school systems will be able to control how the funding is utilized in their individual districts, according to Fagnant.
The Hodgdon district will use the grant funds for telecommunications equipment such as promethean touch screen boards, telehealth, Webcams to improve virtual communication between buildings as well as with health staff, Superintendent Tyler Putnam said.
This technology allows the school to offer resources to students for different types of counseling and as well as improving classroom engagement, he said, adding that robotics kits offer more hands-on engagement in tech classes.
Putnam said they haven’t received word of when the funding will arrive, but assumes they will get the tools student-ready during the summer.
Aimed at overcoming the effects of remoteness and low population density, the distance learning and telemedicine grant gives schools tools to share staffing and access telemedicine for specialized student and community needs, said Fagnant.
The telemedicine aspect of the grant targets current and future healthcare needs for students, according to officials.
“We highlighted the needs of our students for some services — speech, counseling — that are currently used in some schools,” Fagnant said. “This gives us the opportunity to have equipment in place to provide the support to our students.”