How to become a Sister School

Read through the following information and criteria to see if your school would be a good match for the TAHMO program.

Currently, TAHMO is actively engaging schools in the United States, the Netherlands, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Benin, and Tanzania.

TAHMO school partners commit to:

Provide a safe outdoor location for the permanent placement of a weather station.
Assign 2 dedicated staff members as contacts for the weather station (one primary contact and one secondary). Contacts must attend a TAHMO training on the basics of weather station equipment use and maintenance. Contacts can be teachers who are using the equipment for classroom education or other school staff, such as administrators.
Integrate the weather station and collected data into the educational program/curriculum, interact in a classroom exchange with their sister school, and provide feedback on educational activities and data accessibility. Teachers must attend a professional development workshop about TAHMO education modules and applying activities in the classroom.
Fundraise to cover the initial station installation and support costs for 3 years (estimated at 4,000 USD per station). Additional fundraising may be necessary if schools lack internet connectivity or a power supply.

Please send an email to the s2s@tahmo.org with the following information and we will follow up with your partnership request:

What is your school’s full name, and where exactly is it located?
How many students and teachers do the school have, and what is the grade range?
Do you have power at the school, and how common are power outages?
Do you have internet or computers at your school?
Do you have cell phone service at the school? Do you have a 3G cell phone capacity at the school?
Do you have a site that is approximately 10m by 10m for the station to be installed? Please send a photo of your school and the proposed installation site if possible.
Does your school have a website? Please send the link if you have one.

If you are interested in joining a school partnership, the following is a list of expectations for being part of the program:

Communication a minimum of 4x per year with assigned sister school
Download access for weather station data from both your own school and your sister school from the Tahmo portal (login and password required – email TAHMO representative to set one up for your school)
Preferred Communication Method: Handwritten Student Letters- each student in a class writes a letter, the teacher collects and scans letters, emails it or WhatsApp it to a sister school teacher, and the teacher receiving the letters will print and distribute the letter to each student in the class
Suggested communication topics
- Class introduction (Name, grade, age, school name and location, local climate and weather, class photos are nice)
- Compare and contrast TAHMO weather station data from your school and your sister school (choose at least one parameter, and look at different time scales)
- Discuss and answer one of the weather-related questions
- Cultural topics (cultural festivals, holidays, summer plans, hobbies, what they want to be when they grow up, a relevant science/math/geography topic covered in class, etc
- Short video message showing a hands-on science experiment