Cox Charities Awards Grants To Three Escambia Schools

June 5, 2022

Cox Communications employees have awarded eight grants to local schools, through Cox Charities Innovation in Education Grants. The program provides employee funded grants of up to $2,500 for classroom programs and curriculum that encourage and promote students’ ingenuity and imagination. Earlier this year, nearly 40 applications were submitted by schools in Escambia and Okaloosa Counties.

Cox Charities Innovation in Education grant recipients included the following in Escambia County:

Beulah Elementary School – Bringing Reading to Life ($500) – This program will help third graders transition learning by helping them better comprehend the stories they ready by providing them with engaging experiences and discussions. The class will develop projects and activities based on the books they read and discuss.

Escambia Westgate School – Westgate Sensory Picture Book Walk ($1,200) - The Sensory Picture Book Walk for the entire student population at Escambia Westgate will be an innovative way to meet many of students’ complex sensory needs, while also providing them educational activity. The multisensory component of this program will maximize the participation and engagement of our students with unique learning needs. To create this program, laminated pages from a picture book would be attached to signposts. The signposts would be placed along a winding path through our sensory garden at Westgate. As the students complete one page, they can move through the garden on to the next page of the story. The display book will be updated 3 to 4 times throughout the year, to provide a new story.

West Florida High School – Escambia County Living Shorelines Program ($2,000) - This coastal habitat restoration project is a collaboration between West Florida High School and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP). Marine Science students are teaming up with the Agricultural Sciences Academy to multiply and propagate emergent vegetation for planting in environmentally sensitive shoreline areas along the Gulf Coast. The partnership between FDEP and WFHS began as a program to engage youth of our area in making a positive environmental impact through mitigating shoreline erosion, creating habitat for marine life, and filtering out pollution. Through this grant students will: 1) Develop an understanding of shoreline ecology 2) Successfully propagate three species of emergent halophyte plants and, 3) Participate in a shoreline restoration planting.

Cox Charities is 100 percent funded by local employees through payroll deductions. A committee of 13 Gulf Coast employees then reviewed and chose grant recipients based on the amount of funding available.

Pictured: Beulah Elementary School was the recipient of a $500 Cox Charities grant. Photo for NorthEscambia.com, click to enlarge.

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Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under FEATURE TOP STORY, Features, News