GENTRY — Students Channing Babb, Diana Hernandez, Clancy Milam, Haley Howarth and Melonie Yang, along with Gentry High School and Middle School instructor Patrick Lanford, visited the Gentry City Council at its regular meeting on March 6 to share with city government officials the work they have been doing within the EAST Initiative to promote Gentry.
Created for the city and now posted on the city's website, www.gentryarkansas.us, is a video introducing people to the city, its businesses, employers, schools, parks and nearby amenities. The video was shown to the council and explained by students. The promotional video was created over the period of five months by five students, using the technology provided to the students through EAST Initiative grants.
A second project of EAST Initiative students is mapping of the Gentry Cemetery to provide a searchable database with links to cemetery blocks and burial plots to locate graves and to obtain information on those buried in the cemetery. This project was started last year and is being completed this school year. The city plans to link to the cemetery mapping soon.
Another project focuses on compiling photos, stories, artifacts and creating video to document Gentry's history and create time capsules depicting periods in the city's past.
A final project shared with the council is the creation of a virtual tour of Gentry Middle School for new students. The tour incorporates information from photos to reconstruct the student center and hallways of the school and show new students where classrooms and facilities are located. Once the Middle School project is complete, the students hope to begin work on tours of the other school facilities as well.
"I'm very impressed with what you've done," Kevin Johnston, Gentry's mayor, said to Lanford and the EAST students regarding the projects they presented. "I'm looking forward to seeing what you do in the future," he added.
EAST stands for Environmental and Spatial Technology, according to its website, www.eastinitiative.org. The website says the program "is unlike any other model in modern education. It is a project-based, service-learning oriented program that provides students with high-end technology available in the most progressive fields in the world. At its heart, EAST is a coordinated effort to provide today's students with an educational atmosphere that allows them to gain insight into their own abilities to acquire and use information, solve problems and develop valuable experience. Since its inception in 1996, the EAST model has expanded to over 200 schools in five states (Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania)."
"EAST began with one classroom in Greenbrier, Arkansas, in 1996," the website states. "Former law-enforcement officer Tim Stephenson was in his first year of teaching and, having had experience with 'disconnected' youth, had been assigned a classroom of 'at risk' students. In seeking a point of interest for them, Stephenson proposed an outing to a spot near the school where students often went to skip classes. The wooded area included a creek and a pond. It was pointed out that it would be muddy crossing the creek. The first EAST project turned out to be a bridge across that creek ... Stephenson sought help from an Arkansas technology firm that introduced him to national and international resources. The academic-business partnerships that were formed became the foundation for a new and relevant model of learning."
General News on 03/15/2017