Lake Erie College (LEC) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) have partnered to engage in regional research and educational opportunities. A part of this partnership involves renovating a building on TNC's Grand River Campus at Morgan Swamp to serve as a hub for research, professional development offerings for STEM teachers, and educational opportunities for students and community members. The region in which this facility, the Lake Erie College Research and Educational Center (LECREC), will reside faces under-funded and under-performing school districts, particularly in the STEM fields, as well as low levels of environmental awareness and literacy amongst community members. We intend to provide the space and resources to address these needs, to support the development of local research collaborations, and to encourage future generations of scientifically literate and aware individuals. In addition, activities conducted at this site can serve as models for other areas of the country suffering from similar challenges in STEM education.
To inform the development of the LECREC, LEC and TNC a planning conference designed to gather information that highlights the needs of regional constituents will be conducted and a strategic plan will be developed to address those needs. There is currently little interaction between educational, research, industrial, community, and government organizations in the region. To that end, the focus of this conference will be to assemble representatives from each category to facilitate communication between groups, understand the needs for the LECREC of each group, and foster collaboration between groups to better serve the region to ultimately produce a strategic plan to guide the renovation planning of the existing building to meet those needs. The strategic plan will be distributed to school districts, community organizations, industries and government organizations throughout the region by LEC and TNC public relations channels. In addition, the strategic plan, subsequent updates to the renovation process, and activities offered at the Grand River Campus will be publically available at www.lec.edu/tnc in order to provide continued collaboration and sharing.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
