Pleasant Valley looks into STEM curriculum for high school

All-day kindergarten may not be the only curriculum change planned for the Pleasant Valley School District in 2019-20.

The district is proposing implementing STEM curriculum developed by the nonprofit “Project Lead The Way” for its high school students.

Susan Mowrer Benda, curriculum director, pitched the program to the Pleasant Valley’s school board Thursday night.

“The program offers opportunities for students to become problem-based critical thinkers and be able to meld those content areas within STEM,” Benda said.

There are three pathways within Project Lead The Way: computer science, engineering and biomedical science. Pleasant Valley hopes to begin offering computer science and engineering courses next year.

According to Benda’s projection, it would cost the district just over $100,000 to implement the program, with costs including an annual participation fee, technology to accommodate the courses and teacher training.

“We have to make sure we have the right technology to run these programs,” Benda said. “We don’t want to get students in these programs and then not have the hardware or infrastructure we need.”

The recurring costs would be mostly the annual participation fees, which are $3,000 for engineering and $2,000 for computer science; and any additional staff training it wished to pursue. Teachers receive training for each individual course.

“There are a lot of grants that cover STEM instruction, and so we’re very confident a majority of this cost could be picked up through a combination of those grants,” said Kenneth Newman, assistant to the superintendent in the Office of Curriculum and Instruction.

Each one of the pathways is a hands-on, problem-based study and is based on students gaining the knowledge and then applying it in real-world formats.

The computer science pathway includes activities like creating an online art portal or using automation to analyze and process DNA data. There is also a cybersecurity course, which the district said has drawn a lot of interest nationwide and may be implemented down the road.

The engineering pathway focuses on a wide variety of avenues from aerospace engineering to civil engineering and digital electronics.

Early offerings at Pleasant Valley would likely include Introduction to Engineering Design, Computer Science Principles and with more specialties, such as Principles of Engineering, coming down the pike.

“Based on student need, we can implement the sequence of courses how they are written or we can accelerate based upon students’ prior knowledge of an area,” Benda said. “We can’t instantly offer all the courses Project Lead The Way offers, but we want to roll them out systematically throughout the next few years.”

Project Lead The Way has partnered with AP, and there would be an opportunity for Pleasant Valley students, she added, to receive recognition based on the number of courses they would take, putting them in a good position when filling out college and/or job applications.

High School Principal Matthew Triolo and teachers George Boudman and Jeffrey Lazowski joined Benda for Thursday’s presentation.

“If you talk to anyone who tries to implement Project Lead The Way in their school district, they have a hard time getting teachers,” Triolo said. “Here, we have teachers so excited to do this. They are so intrigued and interested in this. We’re not even looking at the biomedical pathway for next year, but I already had a teacher email me because they are so excited as well.”

Pleasant Valley’s board will take a final vote on implementation of the program at a future board meeting.