If the Greywolf Elementary School community gets its way, the school will have a brand new way to check the weather by the end of the school year.
The Parent-Teacher Association is working to raise the last portion of the nearly $17,000 it will cost to buy and professionally install a WeatherBug weather station at the elementary school.
“Weather is such a big thing in this town, it changes by the hour,” said Stephen Rosales, former Greywolf PTA president.
According to principal Patty Grenquist, the station includes a wind sensor for tracking wind speed and direction, a sensor shelter that houses devices that track temperature, relative humidity, heat index and wind chill, a rain gauge and a MotionCam that can zoom, tilt 340 degrees and archive all information for a year. All of this information, said Grenquist, will be on a digital display that “will sit proudly in the glass case in front of the office, accessible to all children and staff all the time.”
According to Rosales, about 8,000 schools across the United States have obtained a WeatherBug station, including one in Port Angeles. The station connects to KING 5 News in Seattle, so the station is regularly updated on Sequim’s weather.
“The PTA has agreed to help maintain the weather station each year, which will cost a few hundred dollars a year,” Rosales said. “We didn’t want to buy this and then not be able to maintain it.”
He added that he was in favor of obtaining the station not only because his own daughters — who are in kindergarten and third grade at Greywolf — will be able to use it, but for future generations as well.
“We want something they can leave behind when they leave the school,” Rosales said of his daughters, who donated money for the station.
Greywolf PTA is looking for donations to raise the remaining $6,000. Part of the proceeds of the Greywolf auction, being held April 12 at the Boys & Girls Club in Sequim, will be earmarked for the station.
“Greywolf Elementary has coalesced around the commitment to having science as the bedrock subject we all focus on,” said Grenquist.
