Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Eli Sutherland describes a catapult he and other students made in a pre-engineering class at the Career Center.
At a gathering of business and community leaders Tuesday, Gena Lustig, a junior at West High School, told how she attends an after-school Robotics Club at the Career Center as often as she can.
“It’s a ton of fun,” she said. “It’s my favorite thing all year.”
School District 2 officials are hoping to spread that kind of enthusiasm for technical learning into the city’s elementary schools starting this fall.
The noon-hour meeting at the Career Center gave those community leaders — and potential donors — an introduction to the district’s “STEM K-12 Initiative.”
STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math, and the plan is to start offering instruction in those subjects in an integrated way to students as young as kindergarten-age.
School Superintendent Terry Bouck said the district hopes to “armor” students with STEM skills to prepare them for postsecondary education as well as a job market that increasingly requires technical skills.
The district will be working with Project Lead the Way, a national engineering-focused program for high school juniors and seniors, to introduce the program to five elementary schools — Arrowhead, Beartooth, Bench, Miles Avenue and Washington — in the fall.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Gena Lustig said her all-girls robotics team "is one of the coolest things ever."
The budget for the first five schools is $969,819, of which the district will contribute $651,233 from the technology levy approved by voters last May. Community contributions to date amounted to nearly $30,000, leaving $290,566 yet to be raised.
Bouck said the continuing costs would be $2,500 per school per year for “consumable supplies.” The district hopes to expand the program to all of its elementary schools eventually.
Bouck said more than 70 percent of jobs in the national labor market require a solid foundation in STEM, and 75 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require it.
Project Lead the Way programs in pre-engineering and biomedical sciences are already being taught at the Career Center. Bouck said a post-graduation survey of pre-engineering students showed that of those students who responded, 86 percent went on to college, 97 percent were still in or had graduated from college, and 92 percent were pursuing or had earned STEM-related degrees.
Lustig, the West High student, said she was on an all-girl robotics team at the Career Center, “which I think is one of the coolest things ever.”
One of her classmates, Eli Sutherland, a senior at Senior High, said the introduction to engineering offered at the Career Center is invaluable.
“It sounds crazy, but the thing I like best about our engineering program is that it gives people the chance not to like engineering,” he said. He went on to explain that the instruction is so intense that students get a college-level introduction, giving them a chance to opt out if they don’t like it, rather than wasting college time making that discovery.
Bill Olfert of Billings, the regional director for Project Lead the Way, said he is working to introduce STEM programs to elementary schools in Montana, Wyoming and Utah. More than 6,000 schools around the country are already taking part in Project Lead the Way, he said.
He said the overarching goal of the program is to help students develop “engineering habits of mind” — creative, solutions-oriented thinking.
Krista Hertz, executive director of the Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools, told people at the meeting Tuesday that community support would be critical in making the initiative successful.
“We’ll be reaching out to you,” she promised.
