Derek Park Fund Grants Awarded to Student, Faculty

St. Andrew’s Episcopal School’s Head of School Robert Kosasky announced the winners of the Derek Park Fund Grant for Creative Innovation on Tuesday morning. The Fund was created in memory of former student, Derek Park, who died tragically on November 26, 2011. Two awards were handed out in total, one to a student and one to faculty.

Maria Naab ’18 and members of the Science and Art departments were the recipients of the awards, which are given to honor Derek’s love of the arts and science.
 
Derek Park was a student at St. Andrew’s from sixth grade through the end of the first trimester of his ninth-grade year. At the time of his death, the Derek Park Fund was created to provide grants to students and faculty seeking creative innovation and personal development. Derek was a member of the Jazz Band (clarinet) and loved being out in nature playing, fishing, riding a bike or hiking. He was an imaginative and creative person who experimented freely with the physics in our world.
 
Naab will use her grant to study architecture this summer at Catholic University. Their three-week course will help her expand her artistic skills and learn to communicate ideas through art.
 
Faculty members Lauren Cook, Anthony Harvey, Chuck James, Ian Kelleher, Kim O’Shaughnessy, Edgar Reyes, Gary Wyatt and Jordan Yonce will use their grant to create a mobile design lab. Design Thinking and Innovation at St. Andrew’s is an active mindset and an embedded instructional practice that links personal ingenuity and empathy to the solution of problems, human needs, social purpose or simple enjoyment. A mobile design lab will allow such collaboration in classrooms across the school, not just specified design spaces.
 
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St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.