Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

In a Las Vegas high school science lab, teens tested solutions in beakers for the presence of sucrose.

Their aprons were still creased. The glassware was unscuffed. The test strips were crisp.

Kritika Ghale surmised, correctly, that her strip would come back negative for sucrose, or table sugar.

“I never had this stuff at my old school,” said Ghale, 14. “It’s low-key fun.”

And it’s hands-on, which Ghale said is her style.

“I learn better with actions,” she said.

Lab experiences like this are available after a grant helped teacher Beata Karczewski outfit her biology classroom at Southeast Career Technical Academy. With $5,000 from iHeartRadio and the teacher crowdfunding nonprofit DonorsChoose, she purchased basic supplies like pH and sugar test strips, test tubes and holders, aprons, cleaning and organizing materials, rolls of butcher paper to draw diagrams and posters on, and live plants to study under microscopes.

The highlight of the haul is two years’ worth of preserved marine animals for dissection: about 500 small squid, plus some starfish, sea urchins and sand dollars. Without this outside funding, Karczewski said, her students wouldn’t be able to dissect anything.

Dissection is a standard experience in more advanced high school biology, but not for the ninth-graders in Karczewski’s classes. She said she talked to her students about what they wanted to see her spend the money on, and they can’t wait for the dissection lab, planned as the big year-end project (for now, the vacuum-packed specimens are organized in a storage room).

Elsewhere at SECTA — one of the Clark County School District’s high-achieving vocational and technical high schools — older students will dissect cow eyeballs.

Squid, though peculiar and simple compared with familiar human and other mammal bodies, will allow students to see respiratory, circulatory, excretory, reproductive, digestive, skeletal, muscular and nervous systems up close. And, marine animals are “something they’re not used to seeing,” Karczewski said.

A parent from Henderson’s Miller Middle School, where Karczewski previously taught, nominated her for the national grant. She said even $5,000 makes teaching a lot easier, and she didn’t keep it all for herself: She also purchased stethoscopes and blood pressure gauges for a colleague who teaches in SECTA’s medical professions program.

School funding is generally based on enrollment — more students, more money. CCSD’s career and technical education schools are smaller than the comprehensive high schools, she pointed out. Career and technical education classes get extra funding for their specialized needs and their equipment is updated often and quickly, but her class, though at a career and technical school, isn’t by itself part of a career and technical program, Karczewski said. It’s general education for all students, regardless of their “major.”

She still wanted enriched opportunities for her students and to get them to connect early to the more rigorous high school academics and their career aspirations, so enter a crate of squid, plus some new scalpels.

“If they can get their hands on samples of things they may work with in the future, or how those body systems work, I find that to be a buy-in for them,” Karczewski said. “Freshman year is pretty hard for them adjusting to higher expectations, so them being able to see that and be like, ‘Oh, this is real. Like, we get our hands dirty. We get to work with real life things and somebody trusts us in doing this,’ is really good buy-in.”

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