Partnership continues STEM effort

Avery Dennison and Partners in Science Excellence work together for area students

A new partnership between Avery Dennison and Partners in Science Excellence is taking its next step toward bringing unique science, technology, engineering and math education lessons into classrooms around Lake County.

This collaboration, which was conceived in May and has since been dubbed “Stick To It!,” involves Avery Dennison employees using the company’s products to create STEM lesson kits for use in kindergarten through fifth-grade classrooms throughout 10 Lake County public and private elementary schools.

The two organizations, along with teachers and a handful of student-testers, met in August to create and assess the proposed lesson plans, Shark-Tank style.

According to Partners in Science Excellence Chairman Tony Marinelli, the next step is slated for Oct. 11 at the Avery Dennison facility at 8080 Norton Parkway in Mentor. There, 60 teachers will be given the actual STEM lessons developed back in August.

“Ten school districts — six teachers from each one — will each be receiving a STEM kit, which has the Avery Dennison employees’ lesson, along with the supplies they’ll need to teach it with their classes,” Marinelli said in an Oct. 2 phone interview. “And we’ll have a member from each Avery Dennison team give an overview of the lessons their respective teams created.”

He said each team of Avery Dennison employees was assigned a grade level for which to create an appropriate STEM lesson using materials “not everyone can get a hold of.”

“The neat thing is you can’t actually walk into the corner market and buy what Avery (Dennison) makes,” he said. “So that makes each of these lessons really unique.”

Avery Dennison, likewise, is thrilled with the concept of having turned the company’s periodic team-building installments into something that benefits the community at large, especially the educational contingent of it.

In August, Brandi Davis, senior technical services manager at Avery Dennison, said groups within the company routinely do team-building workshops like the one that took place Aug. 9. But they’ve never done one quite like this.

“We wanted to do a teambuilding activity that actually had a long-term benefit,” she said, adding that adventures like whitewater rafting trips, room-escape adventures and other common team-building activities are great for a while. But they don’t really give anything back to the community.

“This is a sustainable thing that we can actually look back on,” she said. “It will benefit the business, itself, the community through the students it reaches and, if we can inspire young students to get interested in STEM careers, we’re actually planting the seeds for future Avery Dennison employees. In the past we did, for example, a Trapped! event, which was fun. But something like this will live on. It will endure.”

Marinelli said the school districts involved include Fairport Harbor, Kirtland, Madison, Mentor, Painesville City, Perry, Riverside, Wickliffe, Willoughby-Eastlake and All Saints-St. John Vianney.

Marinelli said the collaborative component of the partnership extends well beyond the PSE/Avery Dennison component. It’s also a big benefit for all the teachers involved.

“The neat thing is, if I’m a third-grade teacher, I can interact with other teachers, of the same grade level, from different schools,” he said.

“So, the fact that they’ll be able to collaborate with teachers from other school districts, to see how they’ll all use it in the classroom, is a big benefit.”

He added that Stick To It! organizers are already looking forward to future projects, perhaps meeting next spring and even setting up a Google Classroom environment to facilitate future collaboration.