Millions of dollars in grant money has been awarded to Pierce College recently, including $2,038,306 to help fund online course development and $359,757 for the Pierce Early Childhood Education (PECE) program.
More than $189,135 was awarded across numerous other grants, most of which were submitted early in the year and approved in August and September.
The $2 million grant, called the Title V Cooperative grant, was awarded by the U.S. Department of Education.
This grant, which 150 other colleges applied for nationwide, is designed to assist institutions that serve Hispanic and low-income students.
The grant will fund a five year project to develop and support online course categories in basic skills, occupational certificates and general education/transfer.
Mark Pracher, grants coordinator, works with the departments at Pierce to seek funding and prepare grant proposals for various projects.
He noted that, of the 150 applicants, Pierce was one of the few to win the Title V funding.
“Grants are very picky,” said Pracher. “They find a lot of ways to exclude you. It’s like a group of students taking a test in class. Not everybody gets the highest score.”
The aim of the PECE grant, awarded by the Los Angeles Universal Preschool, is to develop a clear educational pathway from high school through Pierce and on to CSUN or UCLA in Early Childhood Education.
The grant will also provide resources to recruit students from the Careers with Children project at Cleveland, Canoga Park and Reseda high schools into Pierce’s program.
Of the 10 applicants for the PECE grant, six were funded.
The Associate Degree in Nursing program received $49,795 from the state chancellor’s office to augment funds that were allocated to develop an assessment program of incoming nursing students.
Mary Kay Moran, the nursing instructor leading the assessment effort, explained the Test of Essential Academic Skills that will be starting in January.
“The test assesses skills in math, critical thinking, science, reading, those kinds of things,” Moran explained. “Students have to attain a certain score and if they don’t, they go to remediation in a Learning Skills 33 class.”
The goal of this assessment program is to better prepare students for success in the nursing program’s coursework.
The Amgen Foundation, a therapeutics research and development organization, donated $119,340 to the Amgen-Bruce Wallace Biotechnology Lab Program, directed by Marty Ikkanda, instructor of life science.
“What the program does,” Ikkanda said, “is it provides mostly high schools with equipment and supplies for DNA laboratories, where students produce protein and purify it.”
According to Ikkanda, Amgen donates quite a bit of equipment to Pierce’s child development center, agriculture department and science department.
Pierce was granted $10,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency for the first stage of a project in the annual student-driven People, Prosperity and the Planet competition. Numerous students taking environmental science courses with Craig Meyer, instructor of physics and planetary sciences, submitted a proposal to research combining animal and green waste to create an alternative energy source.
The students, dubbed the Manure Team, were invited to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2008 to participate with other community college and university teams in a process that will lead to 10 teams receiving additional funding.
Nissan also donated $10,000 to the automotive service technology department for the sixth year in a row.
Not only was Pierce successful in terms of the amount of grants received, but most of them were approved within two months.
“It was just this big clump that happened all at once,” Pracher said. “All the [grants] I thought we should get money on, we got approved, which is really interesting.”
Pracher is currently working on some future proposals that would fund storm water management and water cleansing, as well as a renovation of the weather station at Pierce.
“This year has been a good year, better than some,” Pracher said.”We do pretty well as a school considering that we’re careful with writing the grants and what we choose to do.”
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