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$4.9M Moody Foundation grant will broaden STEAM activities
By Rachel Snyder
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rachel.snyder@peoplenewspapers.com
Highland Park ISD officials hope a new $4.9 million Moody Foundation grant will help the district become a “thought leader” in math and dyslexia education.
The grant, scheduled for implementation over five academic years, including the current one, will broaden STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics) activities across the district, expand
Dr. Geoffrey Orsak
course offerings in the high school’s Moody Advanced Professional Studies (MAPS) program, and create the Moody Education Solutions Accelerator (MESA).
The move comes as districts are working to recover from pandemic learning loss and a 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress that showed Texas’ performance in math in 2022 was lower than it was in 2019.
Per the assessment, in fourthgrade math, for example, the average score for students in Texas in 2022 (239) was lower than their average score in 2019 (244).
“What we’re doing is primarily drawing from the research that exists out at universities together with the folks that work professionally within education and putting those together so that we can translate that research into the
Jean Streepey COURTESY HPISD
classroom,” said Moody Innovation Institute executive director Dr. Geoffrey Orsak. “To our knowledge, we’re the first school district in the country that has brought in that kind of research-based focus on really vexing and challenging issues in public education.”
Orsak and Jean Streepey are leading the MESA initiative.
Streepey, who teaches the business design and leadership course in the MAPS department at the high school, is a STEAM instructional coach for grades 5-8 at McCulloch Intermediate and Highland Park Middle School and serves on the state board for educator certification.
The studies will run parallel, but Orsak said MESA would start by looking into dyslexia’s impact beyond reading, including science and math.
“We’ll be looking ahead to try to figure out where do we go with solutions in dyslexia across the entire curriculum,” he said.
Streepey will head up research into math education for grades K-8.
“I was attracted (to the MESA project) because of the K-8 math research and just the chance to build the bridge between what’s happening in our classrooms and what is coming out of our research facilities and helping make that a bridge to help our classroom teachers and ultimately our children,” Streepey said. “HP and the Moody Foundation were so ahead of the curve in knowing that we needed to look at this issue, and then, sure enough, here we are in the middle of state and national concerns over math education.”
The district also plans to move away from having designated staff in charge of infusing STEAM activities into classrooms and toward training all teachers to deliver STEAM lessons.
As for the MAPS program, the district is considering expanding it with two new courses.
Orsak aims “to bring in a wider range of students into MAPS participating in a wider range of educational and professional opportunities.”
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