Four Dallas ISD school to be named STEM Leadership campuses

by PegNews wire

Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women's Leadership School, Arcadia Park Elementary School, Pearl C. Anderson Middle Learning Center and the Dallas Environmental Science Academy are participating in a premiere pilot program in North Texas that is strengthening education in science, technology, engineering and math in 6th grade classrooms through the first annual DFW S-TEC Campus STEM Leadership Program.

The success of the STEM Leadership Program has encouraged the schools involved to continue to implement its fundamentals. On May 8, Arcadia Park Elementary School, the Dallas Environmental Science Academy, Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School and Pearl C. Anderson Middle Learning Center will be recognized as STEM Leader Schools by the board of DFW S-TEC for their successful completion of the Campus STEM Leadership Program.

The 2009-2010 STEM Leadership Program will expand to six different campuses and one individual from each of the four current campuses will serve as members of a Leadership Advisory Team. Enrollment in the program is by an application process. The program takes three to four educators from each school, along with a counselor and a campus administrator and spends a week during the summer developing fun, tangible STEM lesson plans that coincide with a grade-level wide project for students to work on throughout the year. During this summer training period, educators collaborate directly with engineers to make the project and lesson plans engaging. They tour local high-tech companies, hear presentations from STEM industry experts, and develop the hands-on project that will inspire students’ interest in STEM. The educators involved span all subject levels and are not limited to math and science.

During the year each school’s Campus STEM Leadership team collaborated through half day workshops to share their projects’ progress, addressing what worked and the obstacles they overcame for improvement.

DFW S-TEC’s mission is to significantly increase the workforce prepared for careers in STEM areas within the DFW region. Since its inception in 2001, S-TEC has impacted 30,240 students directly, 211,040 students indirectly, 3,667 educators, counselors and administrators through professional development to amount to a total of 245,947 individuals, according to the 2008 Regional Workforce Council serving the Dallas/Fort Worth region.

Source: DFW-STEC