Beechwood School District builds new facilities for career and future planning

“I think we’re in an evolutionary period of public ed, where we had to evolve and do some things differently,” Beechwood Independent Schools Superintendent Mike Stacy told LINK nky.

Beechwood School District is constructing facilities that will expand its ability to provide more career and future planning options for its students. Stacy met with LINK nky this week to give us a tour of the new facility and the district’s plans for the future.

The overall goal of the project, Stacy said, is to synthesize the conceptual or academic aspects of career education with the more practical and productive aspects of work. This will allow the district to meet the desires of both students who are interested in the conventional college preparatory course load and students who are more interested in the practical, productive side of things.

As an example of what the district is going for, Stacy showed LINK only the current engineering lab and classroom in the high school. Students split their time between the lab, where they can actually use equipment to make things and a room that more closely resembles an office space with computer screens on the walls and clusters of desks where student groups can work and plan the projects they’ll eventually build. Many schools will have the former facility but not the latter, Stacy said.

“With a regular engineer, they’re making the plans that are sent to manufacturing or the machine shop,” said Chris Chailland, who was teaching the engineering class. “We’re trying to give students an experience that sort of bridges that, where they can both fabricate and plan.”

One freshman student, Sloan Pangallo, was working on making an electromagnetic rotor, the design of which he found on the internet, with a 3D printer.

“We’re putting magnets on the rotor,” Pangallo said, “And as the rotor spins and the magnets move, it generates energy. And that energy makes the rotor keep going.”

Stacy said the engineering lab served as a sort of proof of concept, and the goal was to replicate these kinds of facilities for all nine of the district’s career pathways.

The new facility’s exterior resembles the old Beechwood High School, torn down about three years ago and which the district couldn’t legally renovate due to its wooden infrastructure. Inside, however, the new facilities will have lab and learning spaces for medical trades, media–including FM radio and podcasting studios–, an entrepreneurship lab, as well as environmental science and agricultural labs, among others. Some rooms will even sport virtual reality equipment that students can use in both career training programs as well as more conventional academic programs like chemistry, physics and foreign languages. With the expanded technological infrastructure, Stacy said, students from all over the commonwealth can actually network into classes to learn.

Other additions to the new facility include a new auditorium, a new elementary library, a student-run IT help desk, a coffee bar, meeting rooms, and other expanded spaces where students can work, study and socialize.

In addition to the construction, the district has partnered with 102 businesses that do hands-on seminars with late elementary and middle school grades, as well as several universities, to help build out the district’s career planning infrastructure.

Overall, the new facilities also will give students space to experiment on their own. That kind of education inevitably entails some failure, not necessarily in the students’ grades but in the endeavors they undertake in the classroom, Stacy said, such that they can learn in the safe environment of a school rather than out in the real world where a mistake or failure might actually cause harm. This teaches the students to be resilient, Stacy said.

“We had to get in our students mindset that failure is a part of growth,” Stacy said. “Success is a mindset, and success isn’t winning every single time. If somebody beats you, tip your hat to them, go back to work, get better, find out how you can improve.”

Furthermore, the variety of options allows students to try things out. That way, if they learn they don’t like something, they’ll have time to try something else in public school before they go off to college or other post-secondary education institutions, where a switch in major or focus can end up being more costly.

“We’ll gladly celebrate them moving to a different pathway,” Stacy said.

View renderings of what the final versions of the new facilities will look like below. Stacy said the construction should be finished by autumn of this year.