OMES hosting serve day

Members of the Oak Mountain community are invited out to Oak Mountain Elementary School for a serve day July 15. Held every year, the serve day is an opportunity to clean up in and around the school, from laying pinestraw and cleaning windows to collecting sticks and fixing the pond in the school’s patio area.

A large focus of this year’s serve day will be cleaning up and constructing OMES’s new STEM room, said Brad Mize, a parent volunteer and the president of Delta Alpha Deltas, a volunteer group of dads at OMES.

After applying for a grant from Lowe’s Toolbox for Education, OMES was granted $78,159. This money will go toward the new STEM room, which will include multiple learning tools including a kitchen, interactive Promethean board, robotics, tablets, computers, legos and otherSTEM items. 

“It’s going to be quite an undertaking,” said OMES Principal Debbi Horton. Horton added that the new room will allow OMES to meet new teaching standards by providing the opportunity for more engineering work.

The STEM room will go in the school’s current “four corners” room, which was built when the school originally opened. While that met older science standards, Horton said OMES felt the room could be better utilized.

On the serve day — also a “Lowe’s Day,” Mize said — the Delta Alpha Deltas and other volunteers will work to clean out the four corners room to make room for more equipment. Lowe’s will also come in to install large appliances in the room during that day.

“What we’re planning is to have the room ready,” Mize said.

Other groups will go throughout the school working on other projects.

“We try to open it up to anybody … We can have grandfathers, [or] kids from the high school,” Mize said.

While the school could use funding to hire a service to come out and do some of the work that takes place on a serve day — such as spreading mulch or pine straw — Horton said parent and community volunteers taking on those projects allows the school to better focus its resources, and to reinvest that into students and their education.