Three years to go until tenure, my knees were wobbly and my throat dry as my Assistant Superintendent called me into his office for a meeting. The meeting was in response to my proposal to set up a subcommittee to assure that new facilities would meet the needs of the comprehensive CTE workforce program that we were building. The district board had approved the current plan—before I was hired—for a NEW center that would not work for our teachers, and certainly not industry, if we were to build this from the ground up to mirror them. 

The day to meet the architectural team was today and they were understandably uneasy to scrap a year’s worth of planning. My assistant superintendent agreed to let me form a taskforce to redevelop the floor plans to meet the needs of our students. Today we would present, no tell, the Board of Education, the senior architectural team, and my administrators, that their plan needed to be revisited.

I do not consider myself an aggressive person, at least I try not to be, but today I had to be. This project was more than just a building; it was a potential cornerstone to the economic rehabilitation of our region. Recently, the machinist warehouse down the street relocated due to a skilled labor shortage. Downtown main street, once a bustling business hub of restaurants and community life, now consisted of boarded-up real estate and tax-free smoke shops. This pipeline engineering training center, called our STEM wing, has the potential to grant college-credit CTE workforce credentials to our students and revitalize our region’s workforce! Our team drew up new floor plans and submitted a revised STEM program outline for the architectural firm to review. We modeled the building after industry functionality and 21^st century creative form and design—an antipodean in most circles-- but a functional masterpiece to us. 

Through a series of talks and presentations, we managed to convince the decision makers that the changes we made were for the better. This shift in design philosophy will have positive consequences for the  school  community and larger region for decades to come. What goals for the future do I have for my career that would affect the profession? We teach our Technology students that innovation is one of the powerful accolades of the STEM occupations; engineers and CTE educators alike have a unique position to augment culture and society for the better. Our new CTE-STEM center stands as a testament to that. Positively affecting my school and (long-term) society for the better through STEM Education are my goals.