(upbeat music)

So you can kind of see the theme that I created this morning when we set off the presentations. I really wanted to focus this morning on school-based implementations. You heard Dr. MacKay this morning talk about her implementation over at Clear Creek. And you just heard Dr. Grella talk about her implementation at Brentwood, and each of them had their own unique features, right? Dr. MacKay talked about how they had a very robust competition ecosystem at the school. Then they brought it down into K to 8, and then Dr. Grella just talked about how everything that they did kind of revolved around the next generation science standards, connecting scientists to students. So both really, really, really unique implementations that we had there.

Our next group of speakers, this will be a collection of speakers, will be talking about another unique implementation of VEX, the challenges that they made. Now, those of you that were here last year, you may have heard Dr. Castagna and I did like a little round table. During last year, we were talking about what we were planning on doing. We were talking about this is what we were going to hope to do, and this is what we were planning on doing. At that time, we got a bunch of questions about, you know, how are you going to get funding? How are you going to get teacher buy-in? And all the rest of those types of things. I'm very proud to say that Dr. Castagna and his team have been able to be successful in implementation, and that's what they're going to talk to you here today.

So it is my pleasure and my honor to introduce to you the superintendent of Woodland Hills School District, Dr. Dan Castagna, the Assistant Superintendent, Mr. Eddie Willson. They will also have some of their teachers present here with them also, so thank you.

(attendees applauding)

Thank you, Mr. McKenna. And thank you to all of you for being with us today. We are very proud of the program we have at the Woodland Hills School District. So we're going to tell you a little bit about who we are, where we are, and why we're here. We are excited with what we have to follow, right? Dr. Grella, amazing in her presentation. One of the reasons that we're here is we get to feed off the energy of each other, right? And get excited about what we're doing. But it also lets us know maybe we're doing the right thing when you start hearing other schools talk about what they're doing in their district.

So, before I go any further, I just want to talk about who we are. We're coming from the Woodland Hills Area School District outside of Pittsburgh. My name is Dr. Daniel Castagna, I'm the superintendent there. I started my superintendent career very early. I was 35 years old and I will just tell you, I'm no longer 35. I had a lot more hair when I started being a superintendent. I am now in my second district as a superintendent. I started here in January of 2022, quickly identified an area of need, and then we put a program into place. So that's what you're going to see is how we evolved from that conversation Mr. McKenna and I had last year at this conference to where we are today.

The only reason we were able to pull this off is I have some great people around me, okay? So I can't take credit for this. My main guy to my left, Mr. Eddie Willson, allow him to introduce himself, but he really took the lead on this and is our main point of contact as the assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum with Mr. McKenna. So let me hand it over to Mr. Willson.

I got it, thank you, sir. Appreciate it. As Dr. Castagna said, thank y'all. As Dr. Castagna said, my name is Eddie Willson, I'm the Assistant Superintendent at Woodland Hills. Dr. Castagna and Jason put together the vision, and then it was my job to implement the vision. I am blessed and honored to be here. I've been in the world of education now.

I started as a teacher and moved to an assistant principal, principal, and all of the roles before I became a central office administrator. What I learned is that you are only as good as the teachers that you can build up as leaders. So, I also want to introduce our teacher leaders who have been integral to our VEX implementation. They're right here in front. If you could just stand up and wave real quick, they'll talk to you in a second. Ms. Tina Dietrich, Desiree White-Price, and Danielle McCoy. These are elementary teachers who were with us from day one when we decided to implement a K-12 Robotics program that is rigorous, relevant, and creates joy in the classroom. They were on board from the start, and we are very excited to share our story with you today.

We are thrilled to tell you about our district and discuss how to implement VEX Robotics on a large scale. Many people will say they do VEX in a small corner or as a pilot program. However, we are the only district in Southwestern PA that is implementing VEX on a large scale, K-12. Every student in our district knows what VEX is and is engaged with it. The young man you saw on the front page is my son, along with his friend, participating in VEX during our VEX period in the elementary school. We are 100% committed to K-12 VEX across our district.

Dr. Castagna is going to tell you a little bit about who we are. A brief history of the Woodland Hill School District reveals a unique situation. In 1970, General Braddock, which included Braddock Hills, North Braddock, and Braddock—three different boroughs with three different high schools—combined. Then, in 1981, the state took over the district and combined the other four high schools, resulting in five high schools merging into one. It was a forced merger, not a choice of the local residents, and it brought about many concerns.

Currently, as we still exist, I am the superintendent of a school that encompasses 12 individual municipalities, each with its own police department, mayor, and borough council. Each has its own identity and vision for the school, and they sometimes don't get along. It's a delicate balance to serve all these populations. You can imagine the challenges of a forced merger of all these districts coming together.

Firstly, there are financial concerns. Residents in wealthier parts of the district question why they should take on the financial burden of poorer areas. Those who pay most of the taxes wonder why their taxes should now support other parts of the district. These are ongoing conversations. Secondly, facilities management is a challenge. The school had to consolidate maintenance roles, and there were discrepancies in pay scales and collective bargaining agreements. Staffing and personnel issues were not fully considered by the state when the merger was implemented.

The academic standards and curriculum were also a reason for the merger, as some schools were underperforming. The idea was to combine high-performing schools with low-performing ones, which led to concerns from families in high-performing areas. Transportation remains a significant issue. As a suburb of Pittsburgh, we face challenges with tunnels and rush hour traffic, making it a complex task that I prefer not to dwell on for too long.

Thank you for your attention and for being here to learn about our journey and the challenges we face. We appreciate your support and interest in our district's story.

And the last one, just overall, the community resistance, as you could imagine. Like I said, I still fight that battle to get everyone bought in that it's one district and not 12 boroughs. So we're a mid-size district. We have about 3,100 students in seat. We have 6,000 school-age children within our borders. So the other 2,900 I bus to Catholic schools, private schools, cyber schools, charter schools, okay? So we do, that's my transportation mess. That's 6,000 I was telling you about.

We are adjacent to Pittsburgh. We are right next to Pittsburgh Public. We are almost identical to the demographics, the needs of Pittsburgh public, just smaller. 12 boroughs I talked about. 75% of our students are of color. 80% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch. We are very well known for our music and our football programs. We have more players in the NFL than any school district in Pennsylvania, probably, we're up there in the country. So we have a very strong athletic program and a strong music program as well. They struggled historically in math and science, and we still do. So this was what the area need came in.

Our vision, I won't spend too much time on this because I know you're not here to talk about vision and mission statements, but it's the power of one, right? We had to bring these 12 municipalities together and make 'em realize it's not about all that other noise. It's really about kids. Now what we say we're about kids, but you have to really write it into the vision and mission statement. Sometimes when I'm in the back room with the board, I have this up on a wall and I take my little highlighter and I highlight students, students, students, students. Remember, remember what we're here for. Remember, we're all about good.

Our main mantra that we do around every single situation in our district is about these three categories, right? Relationships, relevance, and rigor. My job as a superintendent is very easy. I tell people all the time, my job is to set expectations and then build relationships. That's it. Don't make it about anything else. We have to have expectations of our staff, our students, our board, our community, our parents, everybody. You have to set that expectation. It's our job to set that and then build the relationships, get down to that level so that we can really provide students that student-centered, culturally responsive education that we all say we want to do.

All right, so I want to talk a little bit about what I came into in January 2022. First and foremost, we had a lot of community violence, okay? Our school district lost students to gun violence at a higher rate than any other school district in Pennsylvania. So number one, I had to stop that because if we're not safe, it doesn't matter what curriculum we have. The first thing I did was I worked with community groups and created what's called violence interrupters, all right?

When the community heard about it, because when you talk about those 12 municipalities, well, everyone identifies themselves with the town in which they live in and not the school district. So when I say, where are you from? The kids don't tell me I'm from Woodland Hills, they say, I'm from Turtle Creek, I'm from Rankin, I'm from Braddock, I'm from Braddock Hills, whatever, okay? And so what happens is we had these little beefs that were happening amongst the kids that were spilling over into the school. How do we calm that violence? Well, I started working with adults and programs, and when they would hear about something going on in the community, they would tip me off. They would go to the house on Saturday, on Sunday, we would meet students at the door as they walked into the high school. So those violence interrupters really helped us to calm that. We haven't lost anybody to gun violence in 16 months, and we're going to keep it that way.

(attendees applauding)

Number two, I needed to change the narrative, right? All the news stories were talking about fights going on in my school district, fights going on in the community, shootings, and all that. My goal, obviously, at a school district that is losing students at a 10-year decline of enrollment, right? Is I have to change that narrative out there publicly. And that took all of us.

So what did I have to do? Number one, calm it down. And number two, start creating academic programs that we're proud about, that we can market to families, and that are different than anybody else around us has. So we went to the board and we said, "Listen, we're doing this K to 12, every student, every day. Every student K to 5 is in an hour of STEM every single day. I don't want to hear about it, it's mandatory, we're going to make it happen."

These are academic offerings for underrepresented groups. Everyone knows that my population of students are underrepresented in these careers. Well, they're underrepresented in these careers because these programs are underrepresented in schools that have students like mine, okay? And what do they do? They make it a gifted program or they make it a rotating art and so on. So I want my children in my school to have this program that some of the wealthier school districts have or are able to provide.

So the last is the mandatory buy-in. So this is how... My staff will probably laugh at me here because they'll tell you that they were voluntold, they had to do this, but they are absolutely wonderful and great, and really leaders in our district. But my in-service to the staff at the end of last year was, we're going to do this, okay? And we're going to figure it out as we go. We're going to have Mr. McKenna and Audra, and Tim that we are blessed to have in downtown Pittsburgh, 10 minutes from me so I can go get 'em and bring 'em to the school on site so they can give me that support, but we're going to do it, and we're going to do it every day.

And if we would've phased it in or build it one grade level at a time, it would've taken me four or five years to go district-wide. Instead, we just did it, we dove in the deep end of the pool. We offered the support we needed and by the second nine weeks, we're in a pretty good place. I got so much joy out of having conversations with people from all around the country that were telling me, "Hey, I looked in PD plus, and I see what your teachers are doing." I can't tell you what that means to me. That we, Woodland Hills, right? Is now seen as a leader and doing innovative things. So I'm proud of where we are, proud of where we are.

Mr. Willson.

(attendees applauding)

And we know that if you have a hundred percent engagement in the classroom, if a hundred percent of your kids want to be there every day, then all those other problems go away, right? Except maybe transportation. I can't say anything about transportation. That's not my jam. But everything else goes away. If you got kids that want to be there, if you have an engaging curriculum, if you're implementing something that makes kids want to be in school and want to be a part of something that is unique and that is creative, then those other problems, they fade away.

But we didn't have that. So when Dr. Castagna came on board last January, we did not have super engaging curricula. We did not have kids that wanted to come to school every day. Quite frankly, as he mentioned, we had a whole bunch of kids from 12 different neighborhoods that were not Woodland Hills kids, they were Braddock kids or North Braddock kids, or Braddock Hills kids, Turtle Creek kids. And we had buildings that had STEAM on them. This is Dickson Preparatory STEAM Academy. And people kept asking me, "Well, what's the STEAM part?" And I would say, "Well, it is just kind of what we put on the building." It really was.

We looked like a typical middle school, but we put STEAM Academy on all of our buildings because we thought that it looked nice. It was not happening, but we thought it looked nice. So we knew we needed engagement, right? We talked about rigor, relevance, and joy or relationships. If you go out to see these wonderful ladies at their table, you'll see all of their pictures have rigor, relevance, and relationships, or rigor, relevance, and joy. Those are the three foundational pillars of engagement. We believe strongly that if every lesson, every day, every minute has rigor, relevance, and joy built into it, then our scholars are engaged. If they're engaged, then we are doing the right thing by them.

We knew that we needed to have STEAM in schools, but we had no STEAM. But 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 reached out to Jason and knew that they were a leader in STEM education across the globe. We knew that with VEX, we could do a lot and go far because I didn't know anything about robotics. I didn't know anything about computer science. I knew that our kids needed that. I know that that's the next generation, but I could teach you about middle school mathematics all day long; I couldn't teach you about computer science and robotics. So we needed help.

Nobody in our region was using VEX K-12. We reached out to all of the districts in our region. Pittsburgh Public has 54 schools, and there are 43 different districts in Allegheny County where Pittsburgh is. We reached out to all of them, and nobody was using VEX K-12. We wanted to be the first. That's what Dr. Castagna and Jason spoke to anybody that was here last year about—that was the vision: to go K-12, but we had no idea how to do it. So we partnered with Jason, Audra, VEX, and our teacher leaders to ensure that we could roll out a full implementation without any hiccups. It has been awesome. Like I said, K-12 was unheard of in year one, but we knew that we needed to do that. We knew that we needed to go K-12, so we watched demos, talked about how to incorporate it across the board, and 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 going to do this new curriculum." If your teachers are not bought-in, then it is dead in the water. 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 going to speak to you in a second to say, how do we do this in real life? How do we make it so that teachers feel good about it, so it doesn't feel like we're adding something else to their plate? It doesn't feel like we're overwhelming them with some new district initiative for a new guy that's coming in. Because teachers feel that every day. We don't want teachers to feel that. What we want is for teachers to feel like this helps them to incorporate STEAM, computer science, and robotics into everything they do. ELA, Math, all of the things that they do are incorporated into VEX.

We built VEX fully into the schedule for PreK through 5th grade students. There's a VEX period. Every kid in our district, PreK to 5, has a VEX period every single day. My son will tell you it's his favorite period of the day, even over recess and PE. They love it, they love it. When it rains outside and they do indoor recess, and they get to do VEX VR, that's like amazing to them. It's revolutionized why our kids are in school and what gets them excited.

Thank you for your attention and support in making this vision a reality. We are excited about the future and the opportunities that VEX and STEAM education will bring to our students.

We created an elective, a full-elective class in middle school and we built VEX into our 6th grade science curriculum. And then at the high school, right? 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 want to do this. I want to be a part of it."

So I want you to hear from a couple of our teachers about things that they've done in their buildings, and then I'll come back and tell you a little bit more about what we've done at the middle school and high school level.

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Hi, my name's Tina. I teach 3rd grade at Turtle Creek STEAM Elementary Academy. Just a little bit of background about myself: I've been teaching 25 years in the district, but I am an alumni. I was actually a third grader when the merger went through. I went to Churchill Area School District, and it was a lot of chaos at the time. A lot of things were going on, but what I can say is after graduating—and I won't give my year to show my age—I can say I'm probably a more well-rounded person than a lot of people that I went off to college and met, just from kind of going through that whole experience and the different communities, the different kinds of people and friends, and kids that I met growing up.

When we started this program back in the fall, prior to Dr. Castagna, in the 25 years I've been teaching, we piloted a bunch of different things. I was always one of the first ones that jumped in and said, "Oh, I'll pilot it and I'll try it. Why not something new?" Piloted it a year, tried it a little bit the next year, and it disappeared. Then a new program came up, and the next person came in and said, "Hey, you want to pilot this?" I'm like, "Sure, why not?" Again, tried it for a year. Last a little bit, it was gone.

The first thing we heard from a lot of teachers when this started in the fall was, how long's this going to last? This is what we do. But again, like they said, having that teacher buy-in is really important. Having the three of us in our elementary buildings there to support our teachers, using Jason, and having our administration behind us has really helped.

One of the biggest things that the three of us are trying to do with the program is the cross-curricular approach. Rather than just going in and teaching the STEM lab, we're 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're 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.

One of the lessons that I just wanted to highlight was one of the ones that I did. We celebrate Black History Month every February. I always partner up with the librarian in my building, and we would do a research project. The kids would just pick from a variety of choices of names. The past two years, we actually went STEM and made up a list of STEM inventors or STEAM inventors. I took it a step further this year. Besides just the research and creating the PowerPoint, I said, "Okay, well, now take what you've learned and create me something using your VEX pieces." Either an interpretation of the person or the actual invention.

If you see some of the ones we have, like Madame CJ Walker, she created the hot comb, and I had a little girl that just created a hot comb that looks exactly like it. The other one's the ironing board. I thought that was pretty cute. That is a shirt on top of the ironing board, by the way. And then the street sweeper, which I kind of thought was really cool. It was very interesting.

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Thank you for listening to our experiences and insights. We hope to continue inspiring and engaging students through innovative and cross-curricular approaches.

So they had to find a picture of their inventor and then a picture of their invention, and then create something that matched that as well. Hi, I'm Desiree. I've been with the district for 14 years. I'm also an alumni of the district. And Eddie came to us, Dr. Castagna came to us and said, "We're going to implement this program." I said, "Well, I'm not quite sure." You know, we do things and then it goes away. And then he said, "Nope, you're going to do it." So I like to say they voluntell us things.

So we usually do our big STEM that we did prior to that was the Code.org Hour of Code. And I walk into the building one day and they said, "Nope, we're going to do Flex Your VEX Day." I said, "What is Flex Your VEX Day?" And he said, "Figure it out." So they worked with the librarians, we worked with Jason and Audra and everyone from the VEX team. And instead of doing the Hour of Code, we did Flex Your VEX Day. We invited parents, we invited community members, our school board, and each teacher had to create a different center for the students to go through. We spent one full hour of just engagement in VEX during computer science week. It started off to be one day, and then it ended up turning to be a whole week. So that is something that we're looking forward to, again next year.

But we just took our typical VEX lessons and I just kind of went in and said, let's up it a little bit. Let's get parents involved and let's get parents to see what we're really doing and give them that buy-in option as well. So it turned out to be a huge success. So check out our district website and see all of our wonderful pictures.

(attendees applauding)

Hi, I'm Danielle. I am from the third elementary building in our district, Wilkins. This year, we did a science night. It is a collaboration of our PTA, our faculty and our administration along with other STEM activities. We wanted to really incorporate VEX into the night itself. The three of our buildings for VEX GO, are putting a competition, building level competition together where there're third, fourth, and fifth grade are going to compete in the classrooms against each other. And then we are going to come together at the district level in our administration building and we are going to compete with our top third, fourth, and fifth grades. So I figured, why not bring that into our science night?

So we built the Mars Expedition competition field and the code base, and we had it set up for the parents and the kids. What was really interesting though, is the students that are K to 2 that are not going to be competing in this competition, they jumped on the Chromebooks, they used the drivetrain and they were competing, and getting more points than our third, fourth, or fifth graders, which were really exciting. Kindergarten was super excited about it 'cause they don't get to see this particular portion since they do the 123 in their classes.

Our fifth graders in our scope and sequence, they built a spirograph. And I had a few of those on display as well. They were really intrigued by that, especially the adults, because that's from my childhood. And you use the gears, you put the pen in and you were able to make different shapes from that. So the parents were really excited because they could relate to it as a child activity that they did. And then their students just upped it a little bit level with the VEX and they were able to show off what they could do to their parents. So they came through and they did different stations and rotations. Got to see what we do in our classrooms. The parents came through and they were able to see what the kids do and what we're going to be doing, building level and at the district level as well.

So thank you.

(attendees applauding)

And these wonderful ladies are very humble and they don't take a lot of credit. They deserve all the credit, but they don't take a lot of it.

As with anybody that works in a title district, you know that when you have parent events, it is sometimes like pulling teeth to get parents to come out, right? I've been with the district three and a half years, and I'm in charge of our federal programs. I'm in charge of our title programs. Every time we would have parent-teacher conferences or a parent night, if you got a handful, if you got a half dozen parents, you were happy.

Since we've implemented VEX and had Flex Your VEX, VEX Nights, and STEM Nights, we've had hundreds of parents coming in. It's been so engaging that we opened a lending library out of our high school library for parents to take home VEX kits. So we've got parents that are coming to the school to take home VEX kits and have their kids teach them all about VEX. We've got kids in K to 2 who are on the lowest level of VEX that are checking out IQ kits so that they can learn what they'll be doing in middle school. They can get a head start on it, and their parents can work with them on that.

Briefly, I'll tell you a little bit about our middle school and high school. I already told you we implemented VEX through our science curriculum at the middle school level. We created a STEAM elective. The biggest thing at the middle school and the high school level, as you all know, being here at VEX Worlds, is that we've created a competition club. Our competition clubs are already far surpassing any other extracurricular activities that we have. We got kids lining up, and we had to turn kids away because we only had three teachers that could do competition clubs in the afternoons. It's amazing the level of engagement that we've got, and it's not, you know, it's for everybody. The fact that we've got all of our kids from all backgrounds, all walks of life that are really bought into VEX is an amazing thing.

So we talked about relevance earlier, and that's one of our main goals, right? Rigor, relevance, and relationships. The biggest thing that I'm excited about, especially in grade 6 through 12, but also in K-5, is that we are putting real-world problems and solutions into the hands of our kids. It's not a worksheet about here's what 90-degree angles are. It's not acute, obtuse, and right angles anymore. Now it's how do you make sure that your robot can deliver a package from A to B, incorporating a 90-degree angle into a turn, and then you calculate everything out. So our kids are using real-world solutions for relevant problems, and it's really, really amazing.

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 and robotics. So we've created the computer science courses, our tech ed courses. We're working in our gifted program. We have a college and career focus, and we've got those real-world applications at the high school level. In year one, we've seen just from fall to winter in our NWA MAP scores, we've seen more growth in math and science than the district has seen in the last decade.

(attendees applauding)

There's only been one change in the district in the last decade in terms of implementing a curriculum, and it's VEX. We've had the highest growth that we've had. Our engagement is higher than it's ever been. We've got strong engagement from kids PreK to 12, and from parents. I talked about the lending library, and I'm going to talk about it a little bit more in a second. It's incredibly popular. We've got kits on back order right now. My high school librarian's like, "Can I get some more kits?"

Thank you all for your attention and support. It's been an incredible journey, and I look forward to seeing even more growth and engagement in the future.

I got parents that want to check out more kits. Can you imagine a world in which you have parents knocking on the door to try and get more curricular items to work on with their kids? That is what we have right now, and our staff is re-energized.

When you talked to, I got a text from one of my kindergarten teachers this morning and she was talking about, "Ooh, in VEX today we're going to do X, Y, Z." Teachers are excited about going to work, they're excited about the new things they get to do, they're excited to use their creativity. And it's been really, really great to see the level of buy-in from all stakeholders because of VEX. But the most important thing is the kids, as Dr. Castagna mentioned.

So Ms. Dietrich took some of these testimonies, these are just five testimonies, but these are from kids age five, six, and seven about what they like about VEX. And this was November, right, Ms. Dietrich, November, December? 100th day, 100th day of school these are reflections on VEX from five of our K, 1, and 2 kids.

"I like VEX because I learned coding skills. I enjoy VEX because it has so many pieces you can almost find every part of your imagination. You can build a career out of VEX." This is a first grade student talking about building a career out of VEX and tapping into every piece of their imagination. "I like VEX because you learn that teamwork makes the dream work and you learn how to build stuff." Hey, Grayson's got my heart right there. "VEX has taught me about how much I like engineering." This is a second grade student that's already talking about how much they like engineering. And then my favorite is, "I learned how to code and it was fun." Hey, you got kindergarten kids talking about "I know how to code and it's fun, and it's something I want to do." It's not a worksheet, it's not a curricular thing. It's not something where I feel like I'm mandated, it is fun.

So in year two, we're going to add more time to our schedules. We were actually just talking last night about how we're going to build a period into our middle school the same way we've built it into PreK to 5. We'll build that around our lunch period so that every single kid has it every single day. We're expanding our middle school and high school competitive teams. We're going to bring a team here next year. We don't have a team here yet, we're in year one. We're going to bring a team here next year.

We're building out a new scope and sequence for all grade levels. These three wonderful individuals are looking at the state standards and they are building out a scoping sequence for PreK through 12th grade right now so that we can have it out of the box. And again, teachers don't feel like it's an extra thing that's being thrown onto their plate. It's something that they can take out-of-the-box and they can just plug and go.

And then we're expanding the lending library. I talked about the fact that we have a wait list for our VEX kits right now. We're going to build that up because it's one of the most popular things in the district right now. And after year two, we plan to be leaders in the state for robotics and computer science. The idea that Woodland Hills, title one district, 83% free and reduced lunch, 75% students of color is the leader in robotics and computer science. Five years ago, 10 years ago, two years ago was unheard of and now we've got wealthy, affluent, predominantly white districts calling us to say, "Hey, how do you do it?" How'd you do this? How can I do this?

So we're going to be back in Dallas, we'll be here with multiple teams and we're going to be ready to take it all. Dr. Castagna, I'll let you close us out.

How about Mr. Willson?

(attendees applauding)

So just a couple things because these are the stories that I gained as a superintendent watching this program from a distance and going into the building.

So I had some veteran teachers argue with me that they don't have time for this. They say, "I can't fit this into my schedule. I don't want to learn this. I'm not a coding teacher, I teach first grade." And then I'd walk around the building during the first nine weeks and I hear them go, "All right class, if you don't settle down, we're not going to get the VEX time today." And I was like, "Oh, okay, now you're using it to help control your classrooms, right?"

Number two, I'd walk around the buildings and students last year, they'd be like, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I want to be an NFL player, right? Every boy in my elementary, because of our storied history, wants to be in the NFL. Now they're all saying, "I want to be an engineer, right?" Huge, huge.

The story that really touches me is from my background. I started as a first grade teacher. Weird story, I wasn't hired at first grade, but I got bumped two weeks before school. I repented all sins in life for those two years. (attendees laughing) I apologized enthusiastically to those children when I see them because I didn't know what I was doing. But I taught first grade, so my heart is always in the elementary.

We had a student, third day of school show up, one of our elementary buildings. I was there in a building and non-verbal, didn't come through any preschool or kindergarten programs, just kind of showed up with a backpack just looking at us blinking, right? So I'm saying, "Honey, what's your name?" And she's just looking at me blinking, right? How old are you? What grade are you in? Where are you coming from? So, we spent the morning trying to figure all that out.

Fast forward three months, the child was immersed in our first grade curriculum. She's doing VEX every day. So what a lot of people don't talk about is the social-emotional aspect of this program, right? First graders were making a board where if their robot was successful and got to the castle, it would light up, it was excited. And if it failed, it would back up and it would shake. So that's how she learned to express when she was having a bad day or she was sad, and she was frustrated. So what's that worth, right?

When people say all the time, "How are we going to fund this? How are we going to pay for this? How are we going to make this a priority?" I give them that story all the time because there's nothing that gave us that, okay? When parents are calling me saying, "How do I buy VEX kits for Christmas?" On a large scale, it's just been the unintentional impact that we never imagined. So it is something that we are riding with forever. And that's definitely our goal.

We're shifting a mindset. What these teachers are speaking to is a reality. In an urban district like Pittsburgh, we have transient students, you also have transient administrators, right? And every administrator comes in with a new program or a new idea. I'm really trying to build this so when a day comes and they kick me down the road, it's so immersed into my staff and my community, and my families that it can't go away, right? That's our job, that's our job. Create the leaders in the buildings and the leaders with the kids.

We are pressing the gas further. We're going to build this even stronger. We want to continue to engage our community and get them on board. And most importantly, we're preparing an underrepresented population of students for jobs that don't exist yet that we can't even plan for, right?

My goal, you know, one of the goals we had in this was we want to increase the amount of students that are taking AP at our high school. We have a very diverse population of students, but our AP classes don't look too diverse, all right? There's only 20% representation in those courses of students that come from our low socioeconomic backgrounds or our students of color, right? So how do I change that? Well, I give 'em all the same curriculum.

Five years from now, I want my fifth graders, who will be in 10th grade, to be taking AP engineering courses in high school. I want my AP courses to be an exact representation of my student population. That's when we'll know we're doing this right.

Thank you, I appreciate you listening and being with us today. I appreciate the opportunity to show off this crew right here.

(attendees applauding)

The second luckiest thing I ever did in life was getting to teach next to that guy right there. After I left first grade, I went to sixth grade, and I always told people I got to teach next to the smartest guy I ever met. When I left to become an administrator, he took on a gifted position that was outside of what he had been doing, and it led all the way to this. How lucky was I to have this resource beside me? He deserves a lot of credit for our success. Thank you, Mr. McKenna. Thank you.

(attendees applauding)

We will be here, and we'd love to meet you all. So please introduce yourself. Does anyone have any questions? I know the gentleman in the back has a question for me. Eddie, can you give your microphone to Tim?

Absolutely. Thank you, my name is Randy Carter, Executive Director for Mentoring Youth Through Technology. I want to say thank you to Jason, first of all. I don't have a question. I just want to say thank you guys. I've been doing this for over 10 years. We provide STEM training for schools, municipalities, and community centers. Everything that you said today was true and meaningful to me because I go to these schools that have STEM in their name, but they're paying our organization to come in and train for STEM. I have three school districts that spent over $600-700 million on STEM Labs, but they don't have educators to teach it. We're there teaching this and trying to train them, so the investment is not being invested properly. To see what you're doing is rewarding. I just want to say thank you all for what you're doing. I look forward to talking to you more because right now I'm at three schools that spent over half a million dollars in STEM labs and don't have anybody to teach them. We're there providing these services. Everything that you're saying is right on point. I look forward to talking to you more and seeing how to work with VEX to get more participation and systems in place to help these schools develop our next generation of youth. Thank you.

Thank you, appreciate that.

(attendees applauding)

Another question, a question at all? Yes.

(attendee faintly speaking)

So I'll speak to my piece of it and then I'll let Mr. Willson add his piece as well. The parental engagement in the beginning was met with a lot of resistance, right? Because they were like, "Hey, you know, here you come in with your new idea and you're going to start this and you're going to leave, and it's going to be gone, and you're going to make my child have this new program that's going to go away, and they're going to lose math time, they're going to lose reading time, or they're going to lose supports they have at special education." All that resistance I had in the first month is gone. It's completely shifted now. Not only did they have a STEM night last night, but we've had STEM nights for years, right? Just like what he's talking about. You have these STEM nights. They weren't STEM nights, okay? Last night, the principal was just telling us she had to become the bouncer at the door because our elementary building was so crowded for their STEM night last night. That's what it's all about, getting parents to actually show up and turn out because they're interested. The kids can't wait to show them what they're doing with VEX. That's all they talk about. So it's been a complete shift in a four-month period.

Yeah, I mean, I'll just double click on that. To add a little bit Dr.

Castagna mentioned before, we often receive emails from parents asking, "How could I get VEX?" My kid got VEX kits for Christmas, and they were purchased with my money. I didn't steal from the school, but my kid wanted VEX for Christmas. (chuckles) We didn't use taxpayer money for my kid's Christmas, but we have students saying, "Mom, Dad, I want VEX. I want to be able to do it in my house. I want to be able to show you." The lending library, as I mentioned, is just taking off. We have parents saying, "I need to know about this because my kid's excited, right?"

When my kid comes home, if he's got math homework, my wife and I, both educators, know to ask about math and check on the do-now and the homework. We never have to ask about VEX. Every day, for anyone with a middle school kid, you know they are a joy and a challenge. When you ask, "How was your day?" you get, "Fine." But if you ask Eleanor how her day was, she will tell you about something she did with robotics. This is a 12-year-old girl in an underperforming, underrepresented district who will tell you about VEX Robotics and go on and on about it.

In terms of community involvement, we have many partners asking how they can get involved with VEX. We toured Rankin Christians Center and our Rankin building the other day with a group of community providers, non-profit organizations that run after-school programming for our kids. They were asking, "How can we get some VEX kits in here so that when our kids come to us after school, they can also work on VEX, computer science, and robotics?" We're already looking at how to get them an IQ kit or a V5 kit so they can do that. We're getting a lot of buy-in from the community and parents.

I wanted to talk about what the parents have said. We all have tier projects in our district, and this year, I focused on the VEX program. I did a lot of research on the underrepresentation of our population and STEAM. One of the things I did was conduct a Google survey with my families, sending it out to all the parents. It was a beginning, middle, and end-of-year survey. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with parents saying, "I'm so excited. This is so exciting. The kids are coming home and talking about it."

One realization we had is that when kids come to school and do a worksheet, like two plus two every day, they're not going to come home and tell their parents, "What did you do today?" "Oh, we sat down and did 10 math problems on a sheet of paper." But when you put it on the VEX tiles and code a robot to do it, it becomes an exciting story to share at home. These are the kinds of things we're hearing from parents.

As a third-grade teacher, I've seen the impact of the lending library. I have kids with younger siblings using the 1, 2, 3 program. Parents are coming into the lending library, taking out the VEXcode kit. Now, that third grader is going home and teaching their younger sibling how to use the program, and they're using it as a family. It's not just about doing homework alone at the kitchen table. This is what we're seeing on the parent end.

Thank you for your interest and support in the VEX program. We are excited to continue growing and engaging with our community.

They do seem to really love it and they do want to see it continue. I mean, I've had a lot of positive feedback from parents. One other person we always keep forgetting about the buy-in is our principals. He kind of brought this in, you know, principals, there're score, score, scores. But I can go in my principal's office and I can say, look, I need this. And she's like, do what you need to do. So our principal is buying in anytime. I'm like, oh, I need this supplies, can you order it? Put the order in, or she'll, you know, reach out to our upper admin. So our principals have been amazing letting us kind of just go do what we need to do to really implement this and kind of put it out to our teachers.

I also want to give kudos to them because they've been, usually it's like, no, I kind of want to, you know? But she's like, what do you need? Let me know. Send it in, and so they have definitely been amazing. We had state testing and they were pretty okay with us coming down here to learn more. So definitely want to give kudos to our principals.

Thank you for saying that.

(attendees applauding)

Any other questions from the audience before we break? Yes sir. You don't need a microphone, I already know. (chuckles)

How do you support the teacher's professional development? (faintly speaking)

Well, this is his area, but I'll tell you in my experience, and what we try to do as a central office is number one, be present, right? I'm in the buildings, I'm face to face, I'm having those conversations. I want to hear directly from them what their needs are and then go to him and say, how are we going to design a professional development to meet that need, right? Second is, I listen to their recommendations and when you put some of their recommendations into practice, you get a lot more buy-in from your staff, right? But I think from my role, it's getting out of my office and getting into the buildings and watching what they're doing, and listening to them, and then having this guy build the professional development around it.

Yeah, I'll second that and I'll say that the biggest answer to that, the two biggest answers to that are PD plus, right? So VEX PD plus for anybody that's not familiar with it, gives our educators the ability to go on to PD plus platform and say, I'm having this issue, or I want to teach a unit on X using my VEX kits. How do I do that? And then they've got other teachers that are jumping in and saying, Ooh, have you tried this? I did this. Maybe you should do this. Here's a video of me doing this. And so teachers are working with other teachers across the world on their own professional development, right? I can schedule somebody to come in and be a sage on the stage and talk at them for an hour on an in-service day, they are not going to remember that the same way that many of you aren't going to remember a lot, but we're going to start a conversation, it's going to be all right. But somebody talking at you is not going to actually help you to do it. They're working with each other to say, this is how we do it together.

And then the other thing that we already talked about is just having the teachers be the leaders, right? So when we do PD, we have PD days, we have staff meetings, all of those things. I'm not going in and talking at teachers. We're not even having, you know, PD experts come in and give a lesson. What we're having is Desiree or Tina, or Danielle saying, Ooh, let's all do small group instruction on how we're going to teach multiplication through a VEX kit, right? And they're running it just like you run a great classroom, you have differentiated stations for PD instead of somebody talking at them. So it's a beautiful thing.

(Eddie chuckles)

Come on.

So with the PD too, what I think has really been successful just from the teacher end, is the fact that when these teachers are having difficulty or troubleshooting, or one ideas, they don't have to wait till January 15th when we hit with our next in-service day for someone to come in from a company or even myself as you know, doing a lot of that professional development. They don't have to wait for me to get up there in front of the staff and say, okay, today we're going to learn about, no. They can come right to my door, send me an email, send me a text and say, "Hey Tina, I'm having an issue with this, can you figure this out?" And I do my troubleshooting. If it doesn't work, I reach out to Jason, I reach out to Audra, and in 24 hours, I got another robot sitting in the, on the secretary's desk in my office and I'm trading it off with the teacher. And she's like, "How'd you get that so fast?" I said, "Well, this is how it works, this is what VEX does." And we're lucky enough to be that close that they can help us with that and the three of us being in the building, taking that role, I think is real important for professional development.

Thank you.

Yes. Hi, just a quick question. You mentioned working with local employers and also local NG organizations in the area. Can you talk a little bit more about how exactly what kind of role they play in your program and how did you get them to buying in to like be committed?

So first for me, the first organizations I worked with was community groups around the anti-violence, right? So I built that relationship with the groups first and foremost around that topic, right? And then we used that relationship to help us get buy-in with parents when... Remember parents talk. So if this group that are seen as community leaders out in the community are now on board and educated on what we're doing educationally, they're talking at the basketball games and they're talking when they're out with parents and things like that. So they become our advocates to get the buy-in from the families as well. So I think that first relationship is how that tied in.

Second, we have a lot of businesses in our area that can't find workers right now, right? Nobody can find workers. Nobody wants to work. And so what we're trying to build, our next phase is to build a program around automation, AI and so on, so that we're training our kids to walk right into jobs, that employment path. My kids that aren't on the college path or aren't on the military path, I want a workforce development program that builds directly out of this. And that's what we're building with our community. So they are, we have initiatives starting next year with two local businesses that are hiring our students on as juniors. They're going to train them in the summer to start working, and it's directly going to evolve around what we're going to do with our automation program in the high school.

Now that basically to hits on it, we're working to expand, so we work with a couple of local organizations around workforce development and all exactly to Dr. Castagna's point, all of the employers that we talk to say we need kids that are going to be able to work into jobs that haven't been created yet, right? And so when we talk about VEX AI, we talk about coding, we talk about CS, we talk about all of the things that we're doing through VEX, especially at that 6th through 12th grade level. That's exactly what employers are looking for and they are also banging on our door and our community college door. We have a partnership with community college locally to say like, all right, those are the kids we want in our pre-apprenticeship programs. We're only in year one, so like Dr. C said, we're expanding next year with some formal partnerships, but we'll see a lot of potential there.

Looks like we're good.

A round of applause.

Thank you, thank you.

(attendees applauding)

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