Pemberton’s Signal Hill Elementary School is $15,000 richer thanks to a technology grant from Best Buy Canada. Best Buy was won over by a heartfelt video explaining how students would benefit from new technology. Best Buy’s School Tech Grant program is in its 15th year, with more than $4 million donated to more than 300 schools across the country in that time. This year, 18 lucky schools received grants.
Best Buy Canada’s social impact manager, Jen Knight, explained schools all have different goals they want to achieve with the money.
“We created the grant to help Canadian schools access technology to give students a better education,” she said. “For different schools, that can mean different things. For most schools, it’s an absolute game changer. It helps schools to address basic tech needs. Some schools don’t have very much technology, so it really makes a huge difference in terms of taking their students forward.”
Best Buy usually provides $10,000 grants, but upped the amount this year to celebrate the program’s 15-year anniversary. “This will mean even more technology for schools,” said Knight.
Knight said the company was blown away by Signal Hill’s application.
“It’s really exciting for Signal Hill to receive this. They had a really interesting story about how they wanted to connect more as a school that’s a little bit more remote,” she said. “They wanted to access stories from elders. Having the technology to collect those stories is important. They made an application video which we loved.”
It is also the first time a school in the Sea to Sky corridor has received the grant.
“We were really happy to give it to a school in Pemberton,” said Knight. “We are excited to see the impact the grant will have on the students.”
Vice principal of Signal Hill, Cam Strudwick, said the school uses the technology at its disposal to make sure local students have the best experience possible.
“We always appreciate the extra support,” he said. “It’s pretty nice to be recognized and have them supporting our initiative. We are a pretty unique community. Our staff does a really good job of using our technology in unique ways to spread our connections with the community. Our librarian has organized remote author visits where some authors of children’s books can share their learning with our classes. It’s pretty cool.”
The school is already putting the grant to good use.
“We want to make sure that all our classrooms have new digital projection technology,” said Strudwick. “Some of them didn’t. This funding will help us to purchase a whole bunch of new projectors. We are buying a ViewBoard for the library. It’s like a big TV that we can use like a tablet. The money goes quickly, but we are super excited. It will finish off the plan that our previous administration had.”
