Happy Wednesday Beacon readers! Mariah Thomas here, with a dispatch from the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce’s monthly luncheon yesterday. The focus: STEM education, and how Kalispell Public Schools (and other entities) are working together to provide opportunities to students in the Flathead.
According to Superintendent Matt Jensen, Kalispell Education Foundation President Dorothy Drury, and Tim VanReken, the executive director of the Headwater Tech Hub, providing students with innovative experiences and letting them get a taste of possible career pathways before they graduate is an important part of the educational experience.
But doing so requires building partnerships — an ask both Jensen and Drury made of the audience Tuesday afternoon.
Jensen’s district has been an early champion of an approach to educating students that centers their agency, known as personal competency-based education. As part of those efforts, Kalispell Public Schools has pursued innovative programming at all grade levels, including an internship program at the high school where students have a chance to try their hand at potential career pathways.
Those internships, however, are only made possible through partnerships with local businesses who bring on student interns. Jensen outlined a goal for the district of requiring every high school student to complete an internship while at KPS. It’s a far-away goal, as the district sees around 220 students annually finish internships at the high school level. Jensen said he hopes as the district considers scaling up internship placements, it can begin an important conversation with the community about the risks that come with that pursuit, along with the possible positive outcomes for students.
“The risk here for a school system is we’re stepping out of this comfortable space and being able to cherry-pick the top 10%, 20% of our students,” he said. “And we’re pretty certain we’ll have a very positive experience to now being able to put our students in an internship experience, but they have higher likelihood to fail.
“And that honest conversation is something that I’m really passionate about having with the community around, you know, where do you learn? And maybe our question for you guys is: where did you have your most successful learning experiences? Were they through failure, or were they through just this pipeline of success?”
Hand-in-hand with innovative programming, Drury added, comes higher funding needs.
School district budgets largely go toward staff pay and school operations — but to provide students with lessons outside the box, extra financial support is needed, Drury said. That’s where the Kalispell Education Foundation (KEF) comes into play.
She said the foundation has a STEM fund, aimed specifically at helping provide students with lessons and materials in science, technology, engineering and math. Applied Materials donated $25,000 to begin the fund, and KEF is accepting donations to it too. Drury highlighted several grants the foundation has given to Kalispell teachers, like one to purchase models for building muscles in a Glacier High anatomy class.
Drury also emphasized how STEM education goes beyond the classroom.
“I think those skills that are built through STEM education — that of critical thinking, of analytical reasoning, curiosity, creativity — actually apply to all jobs,” Drury said.
And learning those lessons through internships and innovative school lessons can help catalyze students’ interest in STEM careers.
Those careers are ones VanReken, with the Headwater Tech Hub, said there are many on ramps to. The tech hub, one of several that has received federal funding to catalyze growing the tech workforce outside metro areas, focuses on strengthening Montana’s photonics field. As part of that work, VanReken is building educational partnerships across the state, aimed at marrying students’ interests with possible real-world career opportunities. Those are efforts he’s hoping to activate in the Flathead Valley too.
The bottom line: it takes many hands to help students realize career possibilities, and their own potential to achieve them. Innovative classes, internships and real-world applications for lessons learned at school all play a role, particularly when it comes to showing students careers in STEM — especially ones close to home.
“I believe we have really high-skilled, very confident, smart people in our schools in Flathead Valley already,” Jensen said. “We don’t need to import talent. We just need to use the talent we have.”
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