By Sarah Hall

Editor

Kathleen Jenne calls herself a geek.

“To me, STEM is important because… I’m a geek and a nerd,” said Jenne, whose two children go to Van Buren Elementary School. “That’s what’s in my wheelhouse, one of the main things I’m interested in.”

So when Jenne saw a post on the Van Buren Elementary School’s Facebook page asking if a parent would be willing to write a grant application to the National Parent-Teacher Organization to bring a STEM festival to the school, she immediately responded in the positive — and Van Buren was one of just 30 schools across the country to receive the funding. Last Friday night, the school hosted a hands-on science festival as part of the National PTA’s STEM+Families initiative.

“To meet the rapidly-growing demand for qualified STEM professionals and develop the next generation of leaders, we must help students and families build the necessary competencies and skills to pursue STEM degrees and career opportunities,” reads the National PTA’s website. “Families play an essential role in helping their student navigate educational choices on the path toward a fulfilling career. Families are the links to enrichment opportunities, as well as influencers of students’ perceptions of what is possible for their future.”

Van Buren PTA President Emeritus Rebecca McClain, who found the grant opportunity, said the event fits right into the PTA’s mission.

“The PTA always tries to develop a bond between the parents and the kids and the school, and this kind of does all of that,” McClain said. “It really brings together the families to do something fun.”

The one-time grant, funded with support from Bayer USA, helped to provide a dozen different stations at which Van Buren’s K through 5 students and their families could perform different experiments, from testing whether a substance was an acid or a base to dipping balloons in oil and skewering them with sticks.

“The hope in doing that is, if we can encourage kids in STEM then maybe they can see, ‘Hey this is fun, this is something I can do,’” Jenne said. “This is, ‘Science is something that’s approachable,’ and maybe we can encourage them to think about going into those fields later on.”

The science festival is just one STEM-centric activity at Van Buren. The school has a STEM Club, and it hosted a STEM Fair this spring, where kids from all grade levels presented projects. That was also a parent-led initiative, created by Frederick Relyea, whose two sons started at Van Buren in September after moving from Elden Elementary. He and his sons approached the PTA and asked about starting a fair.

“We proposed it to them, and they said, ‘Do you want to head it up?’ I’m like, ‘Sure!’” Relyea said. “So we put it together, and we had 32 participants. The kids were super excited, really into their projects. They knew their material. It was really, really cool.”

Relyea said STEM education is important to him because, as an engineer, he’s seen the achievement gap between the U.S. and other nations.

“I’ve interviewed nearly a hundred people over the last 19 years and very few of them are American citizens even,” he said. “It’s hard to find people in general, but then I’m seeing that they’re all coming from overseas and it’s like, you know, we really need to push the homegrown engineers.”

Relyea said he thinks parental encouragement is one of the keys to keeping kids interested in STEM subjects.

“My oldest son’s going into middle school so one of my plans there is to see what they have in place next year, do I need to help set something up there so that the kids will see these events in elementary school and then middle school, high school?” he said. “I’d like to see it keep going. I’ll kind of leap frog up with my kids and do it.”

As for Van Buren, Relyea said the second annual STEM Fair is already set for next March.

Jenne said she hopes all of these activities encourage kids to stick with STEM. She, too, noted that there aren’t enough engineers to fill the jobs available.

“There are so many jobs and we don’t have people qualified for them, and that startles me,” she said. “If I can just maybe, maybe touch a little bit here, and just get them interested, maybe that kid’s going to grow up to be the mathematician, the engineer, the forensic scientist, whatever they want to be, and we won’t have this technology dearth that will put America behind.”