Kapan, Syunik - In an official ceremony held at the First Kapan School, the Tufenkian Foundation provided chemistry laboratory kits for 104 schools in the Syunik region. The ceremony was attended by the head of Syunik Provincial Government’s Educational Department, Mery Ghandalyan, various local schoolteachers and administrators, and Tufenkian Foundation’s Communications Director Bedo Demirdjian. The kits will be distributed to the rest of Syunik’s schools by the administration in the coming days.
“We would like to thank the Tufenkian Foundation for providing Syunik’s children with these chemistry laboratory kits, stated Ghandalyan. “These kits will help our teachers to better illustrate course concepts through laboratory investigation, which is an essential method for students to learn about science,” she continued.
“We hope that this new laboratory equipment will help to spur a deeper interest in the sciences and make classwork more engaging and fun for the students,” stated Demirdjian. “Lab work gives students a chance to gain hands-on experience and develop a real-world association with what is being taught in class,” he added.
The chemistry lab kits were originally destined for schools in Artsakh but could not be delivered due to the blockade. They were part of a larger initiative that included providing science lab kits for biology and chemistry to every school in Artsakh since nearly every school lacked such equipment. The biology lab kits, which were delivered to Stepanakert just before the onset of the blockade in 2022, could only be distributed to schools in Artsakh in the spring of 2023 due to fuel shortages. Unfortunately, the chemistry lab kits could not be brought into Artsakh before Azerbaijan’s blockade and the subsequent ethnic cleansing in September of 2023. As a result, the Foundation decided to redirect the chemistry lab kits to schools in Syunik. There are 640 students from Artsakh attending school in the Syunik province, while 39 teachers and 101 support staff have been hired to work in the schools.
The school science lab initiative was prompted by Judith Saryan and her siblings as a way of honoring their father, Sarkis Saryan, a noted chemist and scientist. Working with Artsakh’s Education Ministry, Tufenkian implemented a pilot program that began with the donation of biology lab kits to all 29 schools in the Martuni region of Artsakh in September 2021. Based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback from teachers in Martuni, in 2022 the Tufenkian Foundation decided to expand the program to provide both biology and chemistry lab kits for all the schools in Artsakh. An online fundraiser was organized using the Tufenkian-supported crowdfunding platform “reArmenia” and over $40,000 was collected to help underwrite the initiative, including generous matching funds from the Saryan families.
Both the biology and the chemistry lab kits were specially designed to align with the science curriculum for seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade classes. The kits were developed and built by Aleksander and Tigran Yesayan, the grandson and great-grandson of famed Armenian writer Zabel Yesayan. The chemistry kits contain various chemicals, test tubes, beakers, flasks, pipettes, etc. while the biology lab kits included a microscope, specimen slides, petri dishes, etc.