Santa Fe Public Schools expanding computer science program to meet students’ needs | Education

Schools around the world, including those in Santa Fe, just celebrated Computer Science Is Everywhere Computer Science Education Week. In fact, computer science affects our lives every day, beyond the use of cell phones or computers.

All sectors of our economy, right here in New Mexico, require employees with programming experience or understanding cybersecurity, big data, or algorithmic biases due to artificial intelligence.

By ensuring that all Santa Fe Public Schools students receive this basic literacy program, we are expanding their future opportunities.

Our state has an average of more than 2,900 open computer jobs a month with an average salary of $ 71,000. Many of these jobs are in the Santa Fe area, including at Meow Wolf, Los Alamos National Laboratory, our hospitals, state and city government, and many small tech companies – as well as the myriad of tech options for working from home.

Santa Fe Public Schools recognizes these local needs and addresses this challenge through the strategic use of funds from the Education Technology Note (ETN). The ETN uses local tax dollars to fund the district’s technology initiatives. The money from these efforts stays in the community to support student access to quality digital education and resources.

The district’s digital learning program also uses grants from the State Department of Education to improve student access to standards-based computer science and innovation programs and to support professional learning by teachers.

The New Mexico school district is recognized for its innovative and pioneering digital learning practices. The Computer Science Ready 2025 initiative to expand computer science teaching in schools was launched in 2018 as a decision by the Education Committee. Through a step-by-step onboarding process, the initiative now includes 23 of the district’s 27 schools.

As the schools create a three-year plan for the initiative, the focus is on the specific needs of their students and the school culture. The district acts as a support rather than an engine in developing the plan. The aim is to deepen the teaching practice of computer science teachers in order to influence the culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms in the district.

In addition, the Santa Fe Public Schools lead the way in providing every student with access to computer science, thereby ensuring equality and inclusion for all.

An ecosystem of great local organizations supports this work, including Northern New Mexico College, Santa Fe Community College, STEM Santa Fe, Explora, New Mexico MESA, the Supercomputing Challenge, Computing in Research, the LANL Foundation, and the City of Santa Fe.

Computer science is becoming increasingly fun for students because there are so many ways to express themselves as they learn business skills and use their computational thinking to solve complex problems.

About 5 percent of the high school students in the district take a computer science course, a little more than the national average of 4.7 percent. Our next focus is on K-8 students. Through these efforts, SFPS could see enrollment spurts and compete with states and large districts that have developed requirements for a computer science degree.

Together with the Computer Science Alliance, we will continue to expand IT training in our district. The community can also help by creating opportunities for students to apply their computer science skills through creative community projects, internships, mentoring and future job opportunities.

Computer science is something we can all embrace.

Paige Prescott is the executive director of the Computer Science Alliance and has worked in computer science education for over 15 years. Justine Chavez-Crespin is the innovation coordinator for digital learning at Santa Fe Public Schools and has been in the education sector for 10 years.