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STEM Education And More

Jackie Yamanaka

As the Baby Boom generation starts to retire in big numbers, Montana is facing a potential shortage of skilled workers.

Efforts to fill jobs being vacated by retirees start in elementary school.

At first glance, Mr. Marquis’ classroom may seem chaotic. Take a closer look and you’ll find students standing at tables with plastic tubs filled with wires, wheels, joy sticks, and various small parts, and they’re consulting their tablets.

"And what they do is essentially follow the steps and then they record their observations of if they push this joystick what happens. If they hit this sensor what happens and different things like that."

This 5th grade teacher at Arrowhead Elementary School in Billings says his role during this lesson is as facilitator, not instructor.

Ross Marquis steps back to let students make their own their discoveries.

"The thing is they fail constantly as all of us do in life at some point but they’ve got to come back and attack it in a different way, trouble shoot and figure out what’s wrong and what could work better."

That resiliency excites Monica Mainland and Dan Carter of the ExxonMobil Refinery in Billings. They note while the students are having fun, there’s real hands-on-learning taking place. It’s not only engineering. It’s also life-long skills.

"The best part about this is problem solving in action, that’s what the workforce of the future needs to solve problem as they go forward and trying and failing and trying and failure," says Carter. "So I was asking the kid what do you do when it fails he says ‘I try again.’ There you go. Right?"

"I think what I really like about it too is they’re attacking problems," says Mainland. "They’re figuring out how to solve those problems and they’re doing it as a team. So they’re learning how to work together, they’re learning how to communicate, and they’re learning early how others bring different perspectives and help the team arrive at a better answer."

ExxonMobil is just one of several area businesses partnering with Billings School District number 2 to provide funding for “Project Lead the Way.”

The emphasis is on STEM education and it’s helping develop a future workforce. That’s the emphasis of Governor Steve Bullock’s “Back to School Tour” this year across the state.

"Here in Billings they’ve recognized you don’t begin that your senior year in high school," says Bullock. "That if you can get students engaged in high demand fields like science, technology, engineering, and math even when they’re in elementary school it not only sparks that passion for learning."

Bullock is looking at this through a long lens. His administration just released its Labor Day report that touts the current low unemployment rate and new growth for business and industry.

"If I look 10 years down the line that there’s going to be a lot more people retiring than we have workers for even today. And that doesn’t even account for all the new businesses and industries that are going to be coming into our state," says Bullock. "So really what we need to be doing is making sure there’s pipelines of talented and trained workers for every area and this is the sort of thing that I think gets those students excited."

This stop at Arrowhead came on the heels of an announcement in Great Falls earlier in the day that Montana was awarded a one-million dollar grant from USA Funds for college and career readiness.

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