Leech Lake Tribal College Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

Leech Lake Tribal College has been awarded $493,000 from the National Science Foundation.

The grant will go towards increasing the capacity of STEM education in the school. Officials hope it will also help increase the graduation rate in the fields of science, math, engineering and technology.

Leech Lake Tribal College president Raymond Burns said the grant will help students by giving them resources that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to offer.

“It also allows us to support positions within those fields. So it allows us to hire faculty and retain faculty that otherwise we’d might have had to make budgetary decisions with. It also gives us the resources that we need to offer classes which will really expand our offerings for students,” Burns said.

The STEM department chair at Leech Lake Tribal College, Melinda Neville, said they’ve had long-term funding from the National Science Foundation, but this specific grant will allow them to combine the college’s values with online education. Officials hope the grant will increase community outreach and distance education.

“This targeted stem infusion grant is very specific to figuring out how do we integrate Anishinaabe values with online education and what does that model look like. So we’ll be collaborating with some of our other tribal colleges in our area and have that discussion as part of the funded activities under this grant,” Neville said.