ROCHELLE — When a regular school day isn’t enough, the Rochelle Middle School ENCORE Team is more than happy to provide students with an extra means of interactive and enjoyable education.

Whether it’s through digital art, music enrichment, reading and math intervention or even CPR training in health class, the ENCORE Team demonstrated how useful its services can be when several of the group’s members presented to the Rochelle Elementary School District Board of Education at it’s monthly meeting Tuesday evening at RMS.

“The people who are sitting here in my department are fantastic at what they do,” RMS STEAM Lab teacher Vic Worthington said. “It’s an honor to get to work with them everyday, and by putting the tools in their hands behind some of the successful grants we’ve had, I get to see how great they are at what they do.”

Fueled by the $100,000 Dream Big Teacher Challenge sponsored by Farmers Insurance, a grant awarded in October 2015 to only six schools including RMS, Rochelle’s ENCORE teachers have been able to bring more technology into the classroom and making learning a more pleasurable experience for students. RMS health teacher Melody Worthington has gotten much use of her new classroom SMART Board as well as new furniture to promote group activities and CPR mannequins for students to learn life-saving skills.

“I use the SMART Board almost everyday,” Worthington said. “Students have given presentations with it, I give my own presentations with it and I can show videos from it… The kids are trained by [Joelle] Builta because they are actually able to becoming certified in CPR. They pay $3 and they can get their own CPR card but they have to be trained by somebody who’s official as a CPR trainer, and that’s Mrs. Builta and she’s awesome for that.”

Art teacher Robert Donovan has also used the grant money to enhance his classroom, giving students an opportunity to use new technology such as tablets and electronic scribes to express their creative side by digital means. Donovan presented a handful of images taken by art students during the presentation on Tuesday.

“It’s really changed what I do a lot,” Donovan said. “They can do digital paintings on the tablets and they’re able to do it themselves or they can digitally download a picture and then the tablet will draw the picture on the canvas and they can paint it from there… They’re able to individualize what they’re learning.”

The ENCORE Team has given the RMS music program a kick-start as well. Students are now able to have band lessons for the first time, and the small-group, one-day-a-week lessons can help the students practice fingering techniques and hitting those tricky notes. General music studies are now a part of the curriculum in each grade too, with students experimenting in different areas of music including singing and playing guitar.

“They can focus on the artistry of the music and trying to achieve blends and balances,” choral director Hayley Robinson said. “Mr. [Paul] Madere said it’s very beneficial for the students to have these lessons because they help them develop into even better musicians. Their sound is a lot stronger and a lot of community members have commented on how much stronger the sound is at the band concerts.

Perhaps the most important upgrade to RMS through the ENCORE Team and the grant money has been the implementation of Google Classroom, a program that allows students to share anything they’ve created as part of their work with teachers, who can then respond to students live and cooperate together to speed the learning process along.

“If [Diane] McBride was my student, she could sent things to me and I could be adding comments while she’s working on them,” Vic Worthington said. “She could be asking me questions, she could be working on homework from home and sharing it back in and I could be seeing it… It’s so neat to see the kids jump right into it.”

All the tools have combined to give the classrooms at RMS a dose of new life, and the encouraging direction both the teachers and the students are taking is aligned with what Superintendent Todd Prusator is hoping to see at the elementary level.

“What they’re doing is impressive,” Prusator said. “If there was ever a group of teachers who could just work in isolation, it would be the ENCORE group. It would be really easy for Bob [Donovan] to say, ‘I do art and that’s what I do, I don’t need to worry about anything else.’ We’ve asked the ENCORE teachers to be aware of what we’re doing in language arts, in writing, in math and to try and incorporate that.”