Ridley gathers STEAM with $100G grant from Boeing

RIDLEY TOWNSHIP » The Ridley School District has received a $100,000 competitive grant from the Boeing Corp. to enhance learning across Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Music courses.

The grant was announced at the Ridley School Board’s September meeting by Dana Pinketti, director of staff and program development for the district. The grant is entitled “Building Up STEAM at Ridley High School.” Funds will be used to provide opportunities in a variety of learning environments that allow for an interactive process with self-reflection, feedback from peers, and instructor guidance.

The 1,812 students in grades 9-12 at the high school will be able to interact with technology in class, in the Digital Communication Lab and at extra-curricular clubs, including the STEAM Team and Girls Who Code, which is a club for girls in both the high school and Ridley Middle School designed to encourage girls to become more interested in technology. Grant funds will be used to procure equipment and materials for coding, robotics, the Digital lab, and for digital collection and display of data.

“This project will give our students experiences that will create an increased interplay between academics and application,” Schools Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel explained. “The goal in the use of these (grant) funds is to continue to expose students to STEAM learning at all academic levels and to hone students’ skills to prepare them for a technology-rich future.”

During the board meeting, Ainsley Carlson was commended by the board for representing the high school and Pennsylvania at the Congress of Future Science and Technology Leaders this past summer in Boston. Carlson’s official Award of Excellence certifies her successful completion of the course.

Also honored at the meeting was Kenneth Pagliei, who has been named a commended student in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program. Commended students placed among the top 50,000 scorers of more than 1.6 million students who entered the 2018 competition through a series of qualifying tests.

In another matter, Wentzel reported that the district-wide efforts of the medical, secretarial and administrative staff for the successful efforts of

meeting the new immunization mandates. As of Sept. 27, no students are currently excluded from school for non-immunization.