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Equipment Lending Library

Teachers can spend hundreds of dollars on school supplies. Sanford PROMISE gives these teachers access to scientific equipment free of charge.
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Teachers report spending an average of $500 each year on school supplies for their classrooms. One program in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is looking to help.

Sanford PROMISE’s equipment lending library has been shipping and delivering state-of-the-art laboratory equipment to local and regional partners since 2016. This free outreach service makes science accessible to classrooms that are unable to purchase equipment or chemicals themselves. Since it started, over 5,000 students have used borrowed equipment to perform science experiments.

To complete a basic gel electrophoresis experiment, a school might spend over $10,000 to get the necessary equipment, including pipettes, a centrifuge, electrophoresis chambers, reagents and safety equipment. The upfront cost makes these valuable hands-on experiments inaccessible to many students. The goal of Sanford PROMISE is to inspire and engage the next generation of scientists and problem-solvers through programs like the equipment lending library, which expands the accessibility of hands-on science.

Tiffany Kroeger, a high school science teacher from Montrose High School, is a lending library user. For years, Kroeger has used the resources from Sanford PROMISE to conduct gel electrophoresis experiments with her students. In these experiments, students were able to examine DNA using the same tools Sanford Research scientists use.

“Students love to see the big black boxes come into my classroom because they know someone is doing something really cool,” she said.

She encourages other teachers to try it.

“Attend a workshop if you’re concerned about your own skills before doing it with the students, but definitely use this amazing resource to your advantage. It is not every day you can hand your students a pipette and a gel and say try it out. If it doesn’t work, then that is just true science,” Kroeger said.

The equipment is not only for high school teachers. Elementary and middle school teachers can also borrow the equipment. The library includes online lessons that complement the equipment and reagents.

If you are a teacher in need of equipment for your classroom experiments, contact the Sanford PROMISE team at sanfordoutreach@sanfordhealth.org.

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