LEARNS-4-C: STEAM for Continuation School Students
Students in continuation schools are too familiar with the negative perceptions that follow them. Our educational systems do an excellent job at tagging these students as unfit, and what is offered to them is largely centered on their deficits and gaps and not worthy of their intelligence and humanity. Our goal is to work with a select number of LAUSD's continuation schools to help them establish STEAM pathways that expose their students to careers in these fields through interest exploration and real-world learning experiences.
What is the primary issue area that your application will impact?
K-12 STEAM education
In which areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
LAUSD (select only if you have a district-wide partnership)
In what stage of innovation is this project, program, or initiative?
Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)
What is your understanding of the issue that you are seeking to address?
Nearly 51,000 students in California attend continuation schools. If continuation schools constituted their own district, there would be 430 schools and it would be equal to the tenth largest in the state. Dispersed as they are and since they exist in the margins, the students who are enrolled in such schools are often regulated to packet systems, credit-recovery schemes, and other deficit-oriented strategies without seriously positioning them for long-term futures. These young people are often the ones experiencing the most volatility in their lives, yet, what is offered, is unacceptable. What is sacrificed are transformative experiences, connections to careers and pathways, deep learning, being braided with community organizations and partnerships, and exposure to a wide range of fields and interests, among other things. Most innovation and reform efforts don't reach these schools. It is a moral imperative to provide access to powerful STEAM learning to continuation school students.
Describe the project, program, or initiative this grant will support to address the issue.
The Center proposes to partner with the Los Angeles Unified School District to support a small cohort of continuation schools during the 2025 - 2026 academic year to 1) assess existing opportunities to connect students to careers in the STEAM field through curricular approaches, work-based learning, internships, and other career-connected learning efforts; 2) develop a vision for increasing and embedding career-connected approaches related to STEAM into their practice and schedules; 3) provide participating schools with education, training, and support (ETS) as schools begin to implement said practices and strategies.
Describe how Los Angeles County will be different if your work is successful.
There are 39 continuation schools in operation in LAUSD. This project proposes to partner with five of these schools to help them create systems, structures, develop industry partnerships, and guide each school to instituting robust career and technical experiences in the STEAM fields. This radically shifts the experiences of most continuation school students. By working directly with each school and guiding them through the process, we ensure that the work is sustainable and owned by school staff.
If we are successful, we would have created a blueprint for how to do similar work in all continuation schools as well as some of the districts other programs for options youth. We would have dramatically improved the educational experience for our high school students furthest from opportunity. This can have an impact on the other 80 school districts in the county and the hundreds of others continuation schools in the state.
Approximately how many people will be impacted by this project, program, or initiative?
Direct Impact: 50
Indirect Impact: 350