HURON — The Huron School Board of Education met Monday for its last meeting before the Christmas break, where reports were heard from across the district.
Washington 4-5 Center principal Beth Foss introduced instructional coach Bonnie Biel to discuss the progress made of the launch of Project Lead The Way (PLTW) during the first quarter of the school year.
PLTW is a project-based learning approach where students are encouraged to use their own methods of thinking in order to determine the outcome of a certain experiment.
“It has been amazing, a huge learning curve for me on how this particular curriculum goes,” Biel explained. “It goes from first three activities to a project to a problem and it starts off well defined. We give the students very explicit instructions, they have packets to do.
“As we work through the units it gets a little more open ended, they get to really think outside the box, they get to go about it their own way. I think they’ve loved it so far,” Biel explained. “Our fifth-graders learned about transmission of a disease through simulation.”

Three fifth-graders attended the meeting to share their experiences of their PLTW curriculum, which was named “Infection Detection,” where students had to determine which hand soap was more effective for cleanliness.
“We put a disinfectant germ lotion on our hands, checked it with a UV light and then washed with warm water for two minutes and checked it again with a UV light. Then we wrote in out PLTW journal what our hands looked like,” the students said.
“PLTW is a quarter long project where we learned about infection, fifth-graders at Washington elementary learned what bacteria is, how it spreads and how to stop it,” they explained. “The main project was finding patient zero and figuring out what the infection was. I learned how to tell through a microscope if an infection is a virus or a bacteria. PLTW was really fun, thank you for putting this program in our curriculum.”
During this experiment the students used foaming antibacterial soap versus liquid soap to determine which was better at washing hands. This group concluded that foaming soap gets rid of more bacteria.
“The independent thinking of students with PLTW was fantastic,” Biel added.
Business Manager Kelly Christopherson gave a construction update during his report and noted that more information will come after a meeting Tuesday with the contractor and Koch Hazard Architects.
“The main thing that is going on right now is the demolition at the high school, the canopy is gone and a lot of the inside demolition has begun, “Christopherson said.
In other news the Classified Employee of the Month award for December was presented to Administrative Assistant Ashley Neuharth by Christopherson.
Superintendent Terry Nebelsick extended congratulations to many individuals for their successes throughout the district, while in the consent agenda the board approved six new hires and 11 resignations.
Nebelsick gave an introduction of the review of job descriptions in new business, which will be revisited as a first reading at the next board meeting at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, in the Instructional Planning Center at Huron Arena.