Waimea Middle School receives grant
Ho‘okako‘o Corporation received a grant award totaling $60,000 that will support the Native Hawaiian community through the Office of Hawaiian Affairs 2021 COVID-19 Impact and Response Grant: Hawaii Island. The grant will help to support Native Hawaiians students whose education has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The $60,000 OHA grant will be used to fund the Waimea Middle School Malama I Na ‘Opio Project that provides students with the supports needed to transition back from distance to in-person learning. As students return to school, they need trained adults to help them cope with their social-emotional and mental health needs.
The project provides a safe on-campus environment where students can process emotions, rediscover interpersonal connections, and develop effective coping strategies. Waimea Middle School will provide a certified Trauma-Informed Art Teacher/Counselor to directly work with students during the 2021-22 school year to help them develop strategies to manage their anxiety and nervous excitement as they reconnect with former friends, meet new classmates and teachers face-to-face, and resume learning in an in-person classroom setting.
“On behalf of the students, families, and staff of Waimea Middle School,” said principal Janice English, “we are extremely grateful for OHA’s support for our children, the majority of whom are Native Hawaiian and have struggled with many challenges during this pandemic.”
Keck to host virtual Astronomy Talk Sept. 9
The W. M. Keck Observatory will host a virtual Astronomy Talk titled “Lifting the Fog on the Early Universe” at 5 p.m. on Sept.9 featuring guesting speaker Steven Finkelstein, associate professor of astronomy, provost’s teaching fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.
Just after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a fog of cool hydrogen gas. When the first stars and galaxies began to form, energetic light from these objects heated and ionized this gas, removing the electrons from the hydrogen atoms in a process known as “re-ionization.” Although we can measure very well when this lifting of the “cosmic haze” was completed (about one billion years after the Big Bang), we still do not know when it started, and what types of objects were responsible for creating the needed energetic photons.
In this talk, Finkelstein will describe past and future efforts with the Keck Observatory telescopes to study this “epoch of re-ionization,” and discuss exciting new observational programs upcoming with the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope to push our observational limit ever closer to the Big Bang to probe the galaxies responsible.
The presentation is free and open to the public. The Zoom webinar can be accessed at https://bit.ly/Keck-Finkelstein. The talk will also be live-streamed on Facebook.
