Pine-Eagle gets $50K

When Eileen Monti opened her e-mail to discover a contest with a fast-approaching deadline one day last fall, she sat down and pounded out the 100-word essay required to enter.

“I wrote the essay 15 minutes before lunch,” she says. “One of those times when you throw something together and hope.”

Her hopes were realized earlier this month when the Pine-Eagle School District at Halfway was notified that it had won $50,000 in equipment and software as a first-prize winner in the contest.

Monti, who lives just across the street from the school, is the district’s technology coordinator.

Pine-Eagle was one of 21 schools named as finalists in the nationwide competition. Thirteen were awarded the $50,000 first-place prizes and five schools will receive second-place prizes of $10,000.

Three schools will continue to compete for the $210,000 grand prize to be announced March 31 in New York City. The two that are not named grand-prize winners also will receive first-place awards.

Monti said the district put the word out far and wide asking friends and family members to vote for Pine-Eagle’s essay.

“We e-mailed everybody we knew and they e-mailed everybody they knew,” she said.

Five Internet votes were accepted daily from each individual e-mail address, Monti said. She noted that the Pine-Eagle win was especially impressive given that some of the schools competing no doubt had student bodies larger than the town of Halfway where about 175 Pine-Eagle students are enrolled in Grades K-12.

As an added incentive, voters also vied for a chance to win a laptop computer in daily drawings during the period open for balloting, she said.

The contest asked essayists to consider “how consumer electronics, computer equipment and software awarded through Samsung’s Four Seasons of Hope could benefit your school.”

Here is Monti’s winning essay:

Imagine yourself in a room full of people listening to someone talk about polygons.

Now imagine yourself in that same room. With your laptops, you and your tablemates research polygons and their use in tile patterns.

With your Geometer’s Sketchpad you investigate what types of polygons fit together or “tessellate the plane,” and then create your own mosaic. Your group presents what you learned, using your interactive palette to illustrate rejected and final patterns, while explaining your choice of polygons based on their ability to tessellate into your design.

Which scenario helps you learn and recall the concepts better?

As a first-prize winner, Pine-Eagle School District will receive $24,000 in Samsung merchandise, including 12 24-inch monitors, 10 16-inch screen notebook PCs, two color laser printers, five digital camcorders, seven digital cameras, two Blu-ray players and two 37-inch HDTVs. Another $24,000 of Microsoft software is included in the prize winnings along with a $2,000 check from DirecTV and the “DirecTV Goes to School” package.

A list of other winners is posted at this Web site: www.fourseasonsofhope.com/

us/4seasons_hope/education.jsp.

Superintendent Mike Corley praised Monti for her initiative in submitting the essay. As the school reorganizes as a charter district next year, the equipment and software will support goals to “support active learning, increase learning options for kids and to develop and encourage a culture of technology,” Corley said.