LEVERETT — Over the next few months, a bird nook will appear in the Leverett Elementary School library.

There will be outdoor bird feeders, bird charts, bird identification information, and bird guidebooks and textbooks. Students will even have the opportunity to submit videos to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch, a collection of videos caught by bird feeder cameras.

This project, as well as several others, will be funded by five grants totaling $19,000 awarded by the Leverett Education Foundation.

“$19,000 is more or less what we raised last year,” said Steve Weiss, president of the Leverett Education Foundation, which formed in 2019.

Weiss said the organization was thrown for a loop when COVID-19 hit shortly after its official start as a nonprofit. Rather than using the money raised to develop programs, Leverett Elementary School had to use the funds to sustain itself amid the pandemic.

More recently, the school has been able to use the money to create new programs and revitalize old ones.

Along with the construction of the bird nook, the money will be used to help rebuild Leverett Elementary’s greenhouse. When the greenhouse had its 10th anniversary two years ago, it was in a dilapidated state. Since then, the school has been working to make it usable. A portion of this year’s grant money will be used to further this process.

In a similar fashion, the grant money will be used to entirely rebuild Leverett Elementary’s low-ropes challenge course. This course was created and maintained by a former employee who has since left the school. With the grant money, there will be a new course built in time for school to begin this fall.

A portion of the $19,000 will be used to begin a summer garden and nature program next year, and finally, the grants will be used to establish a principal’s discretionary fund for the school year.

Weiss said the Leverett Education Foundation and elementary school officials agreed to establish the fund for the school to use when it needs money on short notice. This fund might be used by the principal, Annie Foley Ruiz, to allow students to go on field trips or support teachers’ training programs.

The majority of the $19,000 raised was gathered through a mail-in donation campaign. Additionally, there were notices put in the town newsletter and donations from local businesses. Weiss said the foundation’s next campaign is scheduled to begin this fall.

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