CONNECTING THE COMMUNITY
Laupus Library at East Carolina University was awarded a $75,000 grant through the Institute of Museum and Library Services to provide laptops and health education instruction to the school-aged children of migrant farmworker families in eastern North Carolina.
The library purchased 100 laptops to be distributed in November 2020 to middle- and high-school children in Wayne and Pitt counties. Beth Ketterman, Laupus Library director, said laptops were chosen as the device to best meet the needs of these students.
“The shift to remote instruction upended education in the greatest of ways,” said Ketterman. “Providing a device that is not just loaned, but given to a student who has the added challenge of potentially moving during the pandemic, means they can have a consistency in access to their learning materials.”
The project dovetails a previous grant coordinated by Dr. Joseph Lee, from the Department of Health Education and Promotion in the College of Health and Human Performance, which provided hotspot internet connectivity for these same migrant communities.
Read: https://news.ecu.edu/2020/11/05/connecting-the-community/