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75% of our students are of color, and 80% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch. We have a very strong athletic program and a strong music program as well. Historically, our students have struggled in math and science, and we still do. This is where the area need came in. We have 6,500 school-age students within our community border, with 3,500 students in seat. Being competitive with the private schools, the Catholic schools, and the charter schools around us is a big issue. We have experienced a 10-year declining enrollment slide, so it's very important for us to be innovative and offer something to families that other districts don't offer. This program was our number one driving force in our marketing leading up to the fall and for next year because we've got to keep kids here. We know that the achievement gap is more of an opportunity gap than anything else. What we need to do is provide scholars with the opportunities to go out there and experience some real-world challenges and solve some real-world problems. That's what VEX allows us to do.

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A primary reason to go K-12 is that we spoke to some districts that have piloted VEX and robotics in middle school or only elementary school. While I think that's valuable, I also believe that anything worth doing is worth jumping in wholeheartedly. We knew that we needed to have STEAM in schools, but we had no STEAM. VEX was there to help us out. We immediately reached out to VEX as soon as Dr. Castagna came on board in January of '22. We knew that with VEX, we could do a lot and go far, even though I didn't know anything about robotics or computer science. I knew that our kids needed that. There are 43 different districts in Allegheny County where Pittsburgh is, and we reached out to all of them. Nobody was using VEX K-12, so we wanted to be the first. That's what Dr. Castagna and Jason spoke to anyone who was here last year about; the vision was to go K-12. Yes, it's every teacher, every classroom.

In a poorer school district that is publicized a lot for test scores, teachers' emphasis often becomes centered around reading and math because they have to pass these state tests at the end of the year. The first conversation with them was about being judged on these state tests. Teachers expressed concerns about not having time to focus on anything else, especially in the spring when preparing kids for the test in April. We decided to move forward regardless, emphasizing the importance of the initiative and offering the necessary support throughout the year to ensure success. We knew our kids needed something that would push them and engage them, providing real-world, hands-on, relevant experience. We partnered with Jason, Audra, VEX, and our teacher leaders to ensure a full implementation without any hiccups, and it has been awesome.

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We're committed to this initiative and will figure it out as we go. We have Mr. McKenna, Audra, and Tim, who are conveniently located in downtown Pittsburgh, just 10 minutes away, to provide on-site support. We're determined to do this every day. If we had phased it in or built it one grade level at a time, it would have taken four or five years to implement district-wide. Instead, we dove into the deep end of the pool, offered the necessary support, and by the second nine weeks, we're in a pretty good place.

Thank you for your support and belief in our vision. We are excited about the future and the opportunities we are creating for our students.

We knew that we needed to go K-12, so we watched demos, we talked about how to incorporate it across the board, and we decided that we did not want a small pilot. We wanted to go all in, a hundred percent. These are some of our elementary scholars, but we knew that in order to do that, we'd have to get buy-in from teachers, right? Anybody that's a district leader knows that you can say all day long, "Ooh, hey, we're gonna do this new curriculum." If your teachers are not bought in, then it is dead in the water and you got to have teacher buy-in. You gotta have teachers that are out there really driving it, so we immediately partnered up with the three amazing teachers that are gonna speak to you in a second to say, "How do we do this in real life?"

One of the biggest things that the three of us are trying to do with the program is the cross-curricular, rather than just going in and teaching the STEM lab, making it, finding a way to get it across the board. Because again, a lot of teachers said to us, "I don't have time in my day, I don't have time in my day for this." But if you are teaching it as part of your math, part of your science, part of your ELA, it's part of your day. You're not really adding anything extra for that. So, we built VEX fully into the schedule for pre-K through fifth grade students. There is a VEX period. Every kid in our district, pre-K to five, has a VEX period every single day. We created an elective, a full elective class in middle school, and we built VEX into our sixth grade science curriculum. And at the high school, we incorporated it into so many courses it's unreal. Our computer science courses, our tech courses, our science courses, and our math courses all had teachers that said, "I wanna do this. I want to be a part of it."

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We have some educators that are building, you know, mazes- Yeah. For robots, and kids in kindergarten and first grade are learning coding skills, playing with a robot, and they think that it's play and that's exactly what it should be, right? Learning should be fun. And when we're having fun, we should also be learning. And that's exactly what's happening with VEX.

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And so, we have scholars who are used to being in a separate environment who don't feel like they're a part of the community of the building, working side by side with their peers and collaborating, like you said. Yeah. And just being a part of a group, which is really a testament to the program and to the initiative and to VEX in general because it is easy and simple for kids to communicate then about an objective and a project that they're working on without feeling overwhelmed or frustrated. Yeah.

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In the high school, we're really preparing kids for careers. A hundred percent, we're partnering with our high school kids, our educators, and with employers in the area because our employers are saying, "We need kids that have experience with computer science, with robotics." And so, we've created the computer science courses, our tech ed courses. We're working in our gifted program. We have a college career focus, and we've got those real world applications at the high school level. Then, we're really giving them the opportunity to choose their path after high school through a robotics program that incorporates everything from MIT level computer science to really building and hands-on technological work with robots.

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Anybody that's been an administrator will tell you that it is challenging, as it should be, to get educators to buy into a new initiative, right? And a lot of times, especially veteran educators will see a new initiative and they will think that it's just like the last new initiative they saw. Yeah. But with PD+, they've got real time, hands-on PD available to them.

We were just talking about one of our educators in first grade at Wilkins, who's engaging with PD+ by watching the videos and then participating in the social aspect of the platform. They're reaching out to other first-grade teachers across the country, asking, "Hey, what'd you do for this? How could you incorporate the math standards in VEX?" It's just amazing how invested they are in this platform, which allows them to communicate with educators everywhere and makes them feel comfortable.

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We usually have a big STEM event, and prior to this, it was the code.org Hour of Code. One day, I walked into the building, and they said, "Nope, we're gonna do Flex Your VEX Day." I asked, "What is Flex Your VEX Day?" and was told to figure it out. So, they collaborated with the librarians, Jason, Audra, and everyone from the VEX team. Instead of the Hour of Code, we did Flex Your VEX Day. We invited parents, community members, and our school board. Each teacher created a different center for the students to explore, and we spent a full hour engaging with VEX during computer science week. It started as a one-day event and turned into a whole week. We took our typical VEX lessons and decided to enhance them. We wanted parents to see what we're doing and give them the opportunity to be involved.

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As with anyone working in a title district, you know that getting parents to attend events can be challenging. I've been with the district for three and a half years, and if we got a handful of parents at a parent night, we were happy. Since implementing VEX and hosting Flex Your VEX and VEX nights, we've had hundreds of parents attending. All the resistance I faced in the first month is gone. It's completely shifted. Last night, we had a STEM night, and the principal had to act as a bouncer because our elementary building was so crowded. That's what it's all about—getting parents to show up because they're interested. The kids are eager to show them what they're doing with VEX. It's been a complete shift in just four months.

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One of our goals is to increase the number of students taking AP courses at our high school. We have a diverse student population, but our AP classes don't reflect that diversity. There's only 20% representation from students of low socioeconomic backgrounds or students of color. How do I change that? By providing them all with the same curriculum. Five years from now, I want my fifth graders, when they're in 10th grade, to be taking AP engineering courses. I want our AP courses to reflect our student population. That's when we'll know we're doing this right.

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I derive so much joy from conversations with people across the country who tell me, "Hey, I looked in PD+ and saw what your teachers are doing." I can't express what it means to me that Woodland Hills is now seen as a leader in innovation. I'm proud of where we are.