Boeing Employees Credit Union (BECU) has awarded a grant worth nearly $2300 to Arbor Heights Elementary School to be used for the purchase of a new A/V cart.

Sarah Lyons, Member Consultant from BECU's Roxbury branch (inside the Safeway Store), delivered the grant check. "We have a school grant program giving grants to local schools in Washington State because we feel education is important and I had a contact list of emails that I sent out to schools in the area. Some of them wrote in and I was sent the checks to deliver. Arbor Heights is receiving a check today for $2,289.88."

The cart will allow videos to be shown to assemblies, and it includes a P.A, system plus closed captioning. This is currently lacking in the school's system so, for those hearing impaired students this will be extremely helpful. Teachers can link a laptop computer or other video device to the system and the cart includes a lockable area so the system can be made secure.

Arbor Heights parent Meri Patton applied for the grant. She's the Grant Chairperson for the school PTSA. "I get information from people in the community and we do research too to find what kind of grants are around and if we qualify, then we put together information based on our school demographics and go for it,"

Third grade teacher Mark Ahlness told Patton that the school was in need of the cart. "Our school has been in need of one of these for a very long time. We need it for assemblies, for staff training and we've never really had an up to date media cart. We've been using a kind of patched together job from my own classroom, so it's really exciting to have a state of the art piece of equipment like this for our school," said Ahlness.

The cart is expected to be delivered within the next two weeks.