Schools

Anonymous Donor Gives Wentzville School District $500,000

Money to be used for technology in the classrooms.

A anonymous donor gave the $500,000, Superintendent Dr. Terry Adams announced Thursday during the district's board meeting.

The funds are designated for technology.

Rich Wilson, the district's director of technology, told the board the gift would allow the district to expand its  technology resources in the district's buildings and classrooms.

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"We are going to implement this in three ways," he said. 

First, the district will install an additional 209 SMART boards in its classrooms. The breakdown is as follows:

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  • 31 in elementary classrooms
  • 118 at the middle school level
  • 60 at the district's two high schools

"This will allow us to finish putting SMART boards in the kindergarten classrooms, so all classes K to fifth grade will have a smart board," Wilson said. "At the middle school level, all core classrooms will have SMART boards and 65 percent of the high school classes will have one."

The board also approved designating $75,000 of the donation for e-books for the district's libraries. Wilson said the district's library system was already set up for the e-books and it would allow the district to greatly expand its library service.

The final piece of the donation will be used to purchase 400 Android tablets. That breaks down to two dozen for each building in the district. 

"This will allow students and teachers to check out the e-books and other online resources," Wilson said.

Before the board voted to accept the donation, Adams noted that the 'wish list' had been approved by the donor.

"There's not much latitude," he said. "Just in case anyone here is thinking that they have better ideas for the money."

Adams also noted that the items to be purchased were previously discussed and approved by the board as needs in district.

The board unanimously approved accepting the donation.

"Its just nice to know that there are people in the his world that think so highly of children that they would do such a nice thing," Adams said.

Wilson will come back before the board in June to discuss how to allocate district technology funding that is now freed up due to the donation.


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