It's one of Dallas ISD's biggest success stories, P-TECH, a program that starts high schoolers down the path of computer science and engineering as soon as they enter high school.
"Just to see the growth from year to year to one grade level, the impact is amazing," said Sasha-Ann Sookram, assistant principal of Seagoville High. While she's helping guide the students to be successful in STEM it's not an area she has a ton of experience in.It's a problem at schools everywhere, an explosion of curriculums, schools and campuses focused on STEM. And while we have a generation of students who embrace all things digital, finding teachers or even worse, administrators who don't just share the vision but also the knowledge has been a real problem for schools.
"For decades we've talked about kids being digital natives and they're far more beyond that now so we want to make sure that our admin are very competent when we talk about that realm because some students are far beyond the teachers and administrators," said Shelia Brown, professor, at the University of North Texas at Dallas.
Brown leads a new program at UNT-Dallas that helps train and lead education administrators in all things STEM. Through a grant from Texas Instruments teachers in the southern part of Dallas County can enroll tuition free.