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Inventor and entrepreneur Arnold O. Beckman is donating $14.4 million to improve science education in Orange County's school districts, with money going to train teachers, give direct grants to districts and create hundreds of hands-on kits for children to perform experiments.
The gift from the Beckman Foundation, announced at a news conference Monday, is the second largest private donation given to a California public-school system.
"Science, I think, is extremely interesting, and I want to stimulate that interest in young people," Beckman said Monday after the announcement at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine.
The 98-year-old founder of Beckman Instruments said he first became fascinated by science while reading a chemistry textbook at age 10.
Under the grant program, dubbed Beckman@Science, individual school districts can apply for as much as $200,000 to improve science curriculum at elementary schools.
The Discovery Science Center, a children's science museum due to open in Santa Ana in December, will receive about $3 million to train the county's elementary-school teachers in science and provide classroom materials.
The third component of the gift is a series of hands-on science kits--140 so far in 14 science subjects--that will be rotated among elementary schools for classes to conduct their own experiments.
"We really have not done a good job of teaching science," said Marian Bergeson, the governor's...