Tired of watching your school district’s enrollment figures dwindle? Start a STEM school.
That’s the message from a story in the Star Tribune newspaper of Minneapolis-St. Paul. It reports that after watching student enrollment decline for a decade, a new K-5 school with an emphasis on the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—is attracting more students back to the Richfield district.
The story cites officials in the 4,000-student district near Minneapolis-St. Paul as saying the school, to open next month, was designed both to integrate more science into the curriculum to improve student achievement and to find a new way to attract students.
“It’s a natural part of the change process for schools to find themselves in a position to remarket themselves,” the story quotes Karen Klinzing, the state deputy education commissioner, as saying. She notes that STEM programs are one of the most popular ways for schools to show they’re keeping up with technology.
Principal Joey Page of the new STEM school told the Star Tribune: “We hemorrhaged a lot of kids out of our district. They’re coming in so fast now.”