Schools get infusion of history

Utah's charter schools and the Tooele County School District are getting an extra infusion of American history thanks to a $1 million federal grant to bring history back into daily education.

Utah's 52 charter schools and the Tooele District will each get about a $500,000 share of that grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

"It's important that teachers learn the connections between history and the rest of the world. We're going to connect history with science, with mathematics, with engineering," said Steve Zsiray, principal at Early College High School, a charter school in Logan.

Zsiray applied for the grant money this year to reinvigorate history education in his school and throughout Utah's consortium of charter schools. The focus on testing and No Child Left Behind requirements in recent years has often left history education out, Zsiray said.

The grant money will allow schools to put history back into the classroom as part of the core curriculum of math, science and reading. Students could, for example, get credit for both history and English by writing a paper based on a historical event or figure.

"History is not an isolated subject. It's a subject that's dynamic," Zsiray said. "If you're reading, why aren't you reading passages in history? We give it a lot of lip service, but we don't do it."

Although Zsiray is not sure exactly how the money will be split among Utah's charter schools, much of it will be spent on training teachers to incorporate history into everyday lessons. Visits from history professors from Utah State University and Weber State are also part of the plan, Zsiray said.

The Teaching American History program will grant $118 million to 124 schools this year in hopes of boosting history education.

"Our nation's founding fathers believed the study of history and citizenship should be at the core of every American's education," U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a news release. "Yet, with studies showing less than one-quarter of American students are proficient in either subject, far too few U.S. students are learning the lessons vital to life in our democratic society."

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