State Superintendent visits Penn

On Wednesday, October 26th, Indiana State Superintendent of Schools Glenda Ritz had time to tour Penn and see our students at work.

While Ritz was here, she met up with our CSI (Chromebook Support Internship) team and visited the Robotics lab. Of STEM in schools, Ritz stated, “All careers are engaging in technology, so no matter what career you go into you’re going to need to have some aspect of STEM be part of your learning.” She believes it essential that schools incorporate technology into their curricula.

About three weeks ago, Ritz released information on a proposal called the OnTrack Assessment System. If passed, this proposal would replace ISTEP with a new testing method. Ritz says of OnTrack over ISTEP, “It’s streamlining our assessment process. It’s going to save over eight hours of testing time for our students, [and] over twelve million dollars in costs.”

When asked about some of the initiatives she’d like to implement in Indiana schools, one example that Ritz gave was “making sure that … students are really introduced to career experiences so that they get a feeling of what they might want to do when they leave our K-12.” She said that Penn is doing well in preparing students for their careers by giving students individualized approaches to what they want to do.