Names Family Foundation Grant

“Providing a Better Environment for Health and Physical Education for University Laboratory High School Students through the Construction of a Gymnasium”

Executive Summary

University Laboratory High School is a selective admission, public, laboratory school that is located in and closely associated with the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Uni (short for University Laboratory High School) was established in 1921 and since then has been serving academically talented students in the state of Illinois. Uni’s mission is “to spark the creative fervor and high aspirations of talented young people; to ignite their intellectual growth; to develop their critical thinking skills; to challenge them through traditional and experimental strategies; to instill in them a sense of citizenship; and to positively influence the larger educational community.”

Uni, despite its yearly enrollment of 300 students, has many accomplished and successful alumni, including three Nobel laureates and a Pulitzer Prize Winner. Uni continues to nurture students to their full potential and provides an environment where students can grow and succeed, as evidenced by the consistent success in various math and science competitions as well as standardized tests. Uni has also been recognized several times as a “public elite” school by Newsweek. Along with its talented students, Uni has excellent faculty and staff. All of Uni’s teachers are very experienced and well qualified in their respective fields. Uni teachers are very dedicated to Uni, with most serving at the school for numerous years and some even serving for decades.

Uni is a publicly funded school, and although it receives support from general state aid, it does not receive support from local property taxes. Uni was originally funded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Education, but the College of Education stopped financially supporting Uni in the 1980s. Today, Uni is funded mostly by the Illinois State Board of Education, and additional funding comes from the University of Illinois and other private donations.

Problem Statement

This proposal has been written as a request for funding to build a new gymnasium for University Laboratory High School. University Laboratory High School has noticed several factors that point to the need for the construction of a new gymnasium:

1.     1. Uni students currently share the University’s old men’s gymnasium with gymnasts, which often leads to various distractions, hindrances, and inconveniences for students during their PE class.

2.     2. Kenney Gym (the gym currently being used by Uni students) is a block away from Uni, which 1) makes it inconvenient for the PE staff to commute back and forth to run errands and perform their jobs efficiently and 2) causes students to lose PE class time due to allotted time given to arrive at the gym.

3.    3.  Many of the locker rooms in Kenney Gym that Uni students use are extremely unsanitary and harmful to health, evidenced by regular sightings of cockroaches and the lack of janitors to clean and fix necessities.

Currently, nothing is being done about the problems listed above. Students have learned to adapt to the inconvenient circumstances in the past, but as the gym ages, these problems are worsening to the point that they cannot be ignored. Uni has been unable to build a new gym because we do not have sufficient funding for such a huge project. This is why we are requesting a total of 1.2 million dollars of funding for this project. This money will be used to demolish the old gym located next to Uni and to build a new gym on that land. A new gym would solve all of the problems listed above as well as provide a healthy learning environment for Uni students that will help to continue Uni’s tradition of excellence. A new gym would be of great help to students who are being nurtured into adults who can positively influence the larger educational community. 

The Fault in Our PE Curriculum

At Uni, all students have sports units in PE throughout the school year up until they become juniors. Every year we go through the same cycle of sports units which include frisbee, floor hockey, badminton, pickleball (?), and kickball. This has become normal and accepted at Uni after years and years of doing the same thing. However, I believe that we should reconsider whether these sports units are truly the most useful and educational for students.

            PE stands for physical education, and just as the PE teachers always tell us, PE is a class just like any other class we take at Uni. This means that we should do our best in PE just like we give our best in other classes, but it also means that we should expect to learn useful things just like we expect from other classes. I believe that PE sports classes should educate students on sports that will actually be relevant later on in life. PE should prepare students so that they are able to engage in the culture of sports by themselves even after high school. With the current curriculum, I believe that Uni students are not getting the proper education or exposure to sports that are a huge part of culture in America and even around the world. Some of these sports that Uni students are missing out on include baseball, football, basketball, and soccer. These four sports are the four most popular sports in the US, and yet we are not being taught about any of these sports in PE. Instead, we are learning about and participating in sports such as badminton, frisbee, and pickleball.

            Although badminton and frisbee are well known and fairly popular, there is no way that these sports should take priority over the other four major sports that I listed above. No one can argue against the fact that baseball, football, basketball, and soccer are all a much bigger part of American sports culture than badminton or frisbee. If this is true, and if it also true that the point of PE is to teach students about relevant sports, then why is it that most of our curriculum involves sports that we most likely won’t get involved in again instead of ones that will actually stick with us for the rest of our lives through culture? The worst part is that badminton and frisbee are some of the more relevant sports that we have. Pickleball is a sport that I and many others never knew even existed, and I can almost guarantee that I will never encounter this sport again after I leave Uni.

            Teaching baseball, football, basketball, and soccer is an ideal PE curriculum, but the truth is that having this type of curriculum is impossible at a school like Uni. The main problem is that we do not have enough money to buy all the gear, equipment, and fields. However, I do believe that we can still make a much better curriculum using what we have. We can definitely have a basketball unit, since we have all the equipment we would need. We have a large gym with 8 basketball hoops, and we have numerous basketballs that are unfortunately only used by the basketball teams. We can also definitely have a soccer unit, as we have soccer balls and would just need to set up goals within the gym to play. Floor hockey is a sport that is definitely much more relevant in society than the other sports, so I think that we should keep this unit. Since we don’t have the money or land to have a baseball unit, I believe that we should keep kickball as a replacement for baseball since both sports have many similar rules and concepts. Pickleball should be removed from the curriculum completely because most people don’t even know this kind of sports exists, it teaches students nothing significant or relevant, and on top of all of that the sport itself is not enjoyable for most students. Football shouldn’t be hard in terms of cost, but it is a sport that I cannot see the majority of Uni students participating in. I would be willing to compromise football for frisbee since we can’t have all of the most ideal sports units. Badminton could either be kept or removed, depending on what students would want. Overall, I think that a PE curriculum with sports units frisbee, basketball, kickball, soccer, floor hockey, and perhaps badminton would be a much more ideal and educational curriculum.