Connecting Learning to the Community and Beyond
School Administrator, March 2022

Many school districts in AASA’s Learning 2025 network are finding one way to engage students and make learning more personal, relevant and joyful is to connect it to communities and the world.

Outside Austin, Texas, the Manor Independent School District’s high-tech STEM schools focus on instruction shaped by students and tied to real-world problems. After seeing the success of those schools in engaging students, other district schools are moving in the same direction, says Superintendent Andre Spencer.

Students in one middle school are solving problems with artificial intelligence. In another, they use digital technology in fine arts. In one high school, students have a courtroom to explore the law, a beauty shop to practice cosmetology and a television studio to try broadcasting. The district now is exploring ways for students to spend time with professionals or industries in the community during the school year and as summer interns.

Career Studies

West Valley School District in Yakima, Wash., has been doing that for years. Students in its Futures program take classes clustered around a career interest. Students can prepare for future studies in sports medicine through the district’s Futures Allied Health program.

Other high school students enter apprenticeship programs, earning as much as $30,000 a year. Some seniors split their days between school and training to be machinists at nearby Pexco Aerospace, a company that makes polymer fixtures for aircraft interiors.

This year, the district launched a middle school innovation center in which students explore career interests in health science, computer science or engineering. The standards- and project-based program allows them to advance at their own paces.

Naperville Community Unit School District, which enrolls 16,500 students about 25 miles west of Chicago, helps its high school students explore and prepare for their future in work and college. The schools carefully track students’ engagement as they explore potential careers, build digital portfolios and earn college credit. Surveys and focus groups ensure no student is forgotten or marginalized, says superintendent Dan Bridges.

The goal is to see “all students are feeling as though they are heard and their needs are being met,” he says.

Ninety-eight percent of Naperville’s students graduate and 97 percent of those attend college.

— BILL GRAVES