Detroit schools will celebrate a serious commitment to STEM and the community is invited
The ability to 'write their own ticket' is a superpower that is often applied to bright, up-and-coming, future professionals that have acquired in-demand STEM skills that make today's employers take notice.
In Detroit, at schools across the Detroit Public School Community District (DPSCD), there are dedicated teachers, administrators and other community stakeholders that talk about a 'STEM Movement,' which continues to pick up steam.
The importance of STEM education to the district will be on full display Thursday evening, June 5, during the sixth annual DPSCD STEM Awards gala that will take place within the Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School auditorium. The community is invited to attend the festivities where more than300 honorees connected to K-12 schools will be celebrated for their high achievements in a variety of STEM-related activities, including the Science & Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit, Academic Games, Math Bee, robotics and chess.
And no ticket is needed for admission to the free event, which is scheduled to begin at 5:30 pm.
'You don't have to be a parent or a relative of one of the honorees to attend, if you're a part of the village and care about young people in Detroit, we hope you will show up at King High School's beautiful auditorium and cheer our young people on,' DPSCD School Board Member Angelique Peterson-Mayberry, who chairs the board's Curriculum/Academic committee and also will serve as master of ceremonies during the STEM Awards gala, stated as final preparation was being completed for Thursday's event.
Many of the students — representing more than 50 schools — that will be receiving customized trophies and medals, created with special care by Livonia-based A.J. Bros. LLC, have already had an opportunity to compete with and against other top students from outside of Detroit. For example, Detroit students and teams that participate in robotics, chess and Academic Games — a unique collection of games including math contests (Equations and On-Sets) — have regularly participated in competitions on the state and national levels.
'Often public education doesn't get its due, but we want our parents and community to know that this is what public education looks like in its most holistic form,' said Peterson-Mayberry, who will be making another happy return to King High School, where she graduated in 1992 out of the MSAT (Mathematics, Science and Applied Technology) program. 'There is a prize at the end for all the students that will be recognized because they are gaining tools that they will use in life.'
In addition to the awards presented to the students, special awards will be given to STEM coaches — representing DPSCD educators and community volunteers — that have gone above and beyond the call of duty. And then there are the Principal 3 for 3 Awards that will be awarded to principals that have made a special effort to promote STEM by providing robotics, Academic Games and chess programs at their schools.
'For our coaches and school principals that make our STEM programs successful, we just want to say thank you for dedicating their time and talent to our young people outside of the classroom,' said Peterson-Mayberry, who will be joined on the King auditorium stage throughout the program by her fellow Class of 1992 King classmate Carl Hollier, musically known as DJ Invisible, who is expected to supply doses of pulsating music and witty banter as he has done at previous DPSCD STEM Awards galas, where students make a red carpet entrance as they file into the auditorium.
Another hat that Peterson-Mayberry wears in the community includes being a Global Diversity Equity Inclusion Manager for manufacturing employees at Ford Motor Company. And as it turns out, she also will be joined on Thursday evening by others from the automotive community that have taken a special interest in STEM education at DPSCD schools, including representatives from General Motors, the sponsor of this year's STEM Awards gala, through a generous contribution made to the Detroit Public Schools Community District Foundation.
"Innovation is the heart of the automotive industry, and STEM education fuels that creativity,' General Motors' Rhonda Fields, Portfolio Lead for STEAM Education, said. 'By supporting the DPSCD STEM Awards, we're strengthening a culture of problem-solving, investing in the future workforce, and inspiring students to see the possibilities within STEM careers.
'We want young minds to know that their talents can lead to groundbreaking advancements — not just in automotive, but across many industries that shape our world."
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Special evening planned for shining STEM stars in Detroit
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
New Research: Childhood Vaccination Rates Drop Across 1,600 U.S. Counties
Childhood vaccination rates have markedly declined across the U.S. since the start of COVID, according to new Johns Hopkins University research showing 78% of more than 2,000 counties reported drops and the average immunization rate had fallen to 91% — further below the 95% threshold needed for herd immunity While existing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data has historically shown broadly declining measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates at the state and national levels, the county-level analysis published this week in JAMA is far more granular. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter It provides a 'better understanding of these pockets where you have more exceptionally high risk,' said senior author Lauren Gardner, the director of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering. 'Knowing where there are problem areas,' she added, 'gives policymakers and public health professionals locations to target their limited resources to try and improve vaccination coverage and therefore minimize the potential risk of measles outbreaks.' The country is currently experiencing a deadly measles outbreak that has infected over 1,000 people across 30 states and killed two unvaccinated children. Case numbers this year have already surpassed 2024's total and mark the second-highest number of confirmed cases in a year since the disease was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. Some 96% of reported infections have involved a person who was unvaccinated or whose status was unknown and 13% have resulted in hospitalization. Related Gardner, who also led the data collection efforts behind Johns Hopkins' COVID-19 dashboard, and her team collected county-level, two-dose MMR vaccine rates for kindergarteners from each state's department of health website from 2017 to 2024, where available. Ultimately, they were able to analyze trends in 2,066 counties across 33 states and made all their data available to download. While state level average rates may decline by a few percentage points, the researchers found 130 counties where they dropped by at least 10 percentage points, and in 15 of those counties, they plummeted more than 20. Only four of the states studied — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — reported an increase in the median county-level vaccination rate. They are currently the only four states that exclusively allow medical — and not philosophical or religious — exemptions to mandatory vaccines for school-aged children. Related Gardner said she pursued the county-level data after observing growing vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. Based on her years of work in the field, she said she was '100% expecting to see [these current outbreaks].' If vaccination rates continue to drop 'measles is likely to return to endemic levels in the US,' according to the Johns Hopkins' report — a concern other experts see as heightened by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now heading the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. A well-known vaccine skeptic, Kennedy initially downplayed the measles spread in late February and has been inconsistent in his support of the MMR vaccine. Related Under Kennedy's leadership, the Trump administration released the controversial 'Make America Healthy Again' report on May 22, which misinterpreted studies, cited ones that don't exist and is suspected of being generated in part by artificial intelligence. The report, which involved no pediatricians, questions the safety and importance of some childhood vaccines. 'Despite the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule,' the report reads, 'there has been limited scientific inquiry into the links between vaccines and chronic disease, the impacts of vaccine injury, and conflicts of interest in the development of the vaccine schedule.' Related Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, pushed back on these assertions. The issue has been well studied, and there is no evidence of links between childhood vaccines and chronic diseases — including diabetes and autism — said Offit, who is also a voting member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He referenced 24 studies across seven countries and three continents involving thousands of children that show they're at no greater risk of developing autism if they receive the MMR vaccine. Current skepticism is not isolated to the measles vaccine: The Food and Drug Administration, which falls under HHS, recently released updated guidance which no longer recommends the COVID vaccine for healthy children or pregnant women. In response, a top COVID vaccine adviser at the CDC resigned this week, according to reporting from The Washington Post. And across the country, numerous states have introduced legislation to loosen vaccine requirements for school-aged children, opening the door for more parents to opt their kids out. 'I think this is only going to get worse,' Offit said. 'I think vaccines are under attack. You have a secretary of Health and Human Services who will do everything he can during the years that he is in that position to make vaccines less available, less affordable and more feared. … So I think this is a dangerous time to be a child in the United States of America.'
New York Times
17 hours ago
- New York Times
The Humanist Who Designed a Deadly Weapon
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. Once, during an interview, I saw him in action as he described a run of knotty calculations he was doing in his head — the kind of math his peers usually worked out on paper or with computers. That gift was surely one reason that Enrico Fermi, a founder of the nuclear age who mentored him at the University of Chicago, called Richard L. Garwin 'the only true genius I have ever met.' It also played to a popular image of Dr. Garwin as slightly robotic, even computerlike, a thinking machine that happened to have legs. Dr. Garwin died last month at 97, leaving behind a legacy of contradictions. In 1951, at age 23, he designed the first hydrogen bomb, the world's deadliest weapon, a planet shaker that could end civilization. He then devoted his life to counteracting the terror. Over four decades of interviews, chats and social interactions, I learned that the man behind the stereotypes was full of surprises, which I wrote about in a recent article. He had a reputation for being cruel to those he saw as less talented. That may have been true in the prime of his professional life. But in person during his later years, Dr. Garwin came across as a gentle academic, a humanist whose life turned out to be rich in benevolent acts. Years ago, Gene Cittadino, a friend of mine who taught science history at New York University, asked me if Dr. Garwin might be willing to speak to his class. After the talk, Gene and several students took him to lunch and were regaled with stories about the presidents he advised. 'He was soft-spoken, sharp as a tack and funny,' Gene recalled. The whiz, he added, 'treated us with respect,' as if we were his colleagues. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Dehorning of S.African rhinos slashed poaching: study
The dehorning of rhinos resulted in a nearly 80-percent reduction in the poaching of the animals during a seven-year study in a major South African conservation area, researchers said Thursday. Sawing off the sought-after horns was also a fraction of the cost of other counter-poaching measures such as deploying rangers or tracking dogs, according to the study published in the journal Science. The study was carried out between 2017 and 2023 in 11 reserves around South Africa's famed Kruger National Park that protect the world's largest rhino population. During this period, some 1,985 rhinos were poached in the reserves in the Greater Kruger area despite $74 million spent mostly on reactive law enforcement measures that netted around 700 poachers, it said. By contrast, dehorning 2,284 rhinos cut poaching by 78 percent at just 1.2 percent of that budget, said the study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Some poaching of dehorned rhinos continued because poachers targeted horn stumps and regrowth, signalling the need for regular dehorning alongside judicious use of law enforcement," the study said. South Africa is home to most of the world's rhinos, including the critically endangered black rhino, and is a hotspot for poaching driven by demand in Asia where the horns are used in traditional medicine. Rhino horn is highly sought after on the black market, where the price by weight rivals that of gold and cocaine. Alongside ivory, the horns are coveted as status symbols or used in traditional medicine for their supposed aphrodisiac properties. "Ongoing socioeconomic inequality incentivises a large pool of vulnerable and motivated people to join, or poach for, criminal syndicates even when the risks are high," the researchers said. Corruption also played a role with gangs receiving insider tips to evade detection and arrest, they said. - Impacts unclear - "Although detecting and arresting poachers is essential, strategies that focus on reducing opportunities for and rewards from poaching may be more effective," the study said. It added, however, that "the effects of dehorning on rhino biology are still unclear, with present research suggesting that dehorning may alter rhino space use but not survival and reproduction." The co-authors of the study are from South Africa's Nelson Mandela University and the University of Cape Town, and various conservation groups including the Wildlife Conservation Network and United Kingdom's Save the Rhino International. South Africa had more than 16,000 rhinos at the end of 2023, mostly white rhinos, according to government data. But at least 34 rhinos were killed each month, the environment minister said in May. In 2024 South African scientists injected radioactive material into live rhino horns to make them easier to detect at border posts in a pioneering project aimed at curbing poaching. The radioactive material would not impact the animal's health or the environment in any way but make it poisonous for human consumption, according to the University of the Witwatersrand's radiation and health physics unit which spearheaded the initiative. Black rhinos are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as critically endangered. ho/br/rlp
