HANCEVILLE, Ala. – Cullman County Schools debuted one of its newest additions at Hanceville Elementary School last Friday morning. CCBOE’s maintenance crew has been hard at work converting a school bus into a mobile STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education lab and Hanceville Elementary and Primary School students were the first of the county’s students to climb aboard and test it out.
A pair of retired Cullman County Schools teachers, Jennifer Tucker and Kristi Barnette, are returning to run the lab and guide students through several hands-on projects and experiments. Cullman County Schools Superintendent Dr. Shane Barnette was excited to break out the new addition Friday and wants to provide students with as many avenues for STEM education as possible.
“Just this past week we rolled out our new STEM bus. Not every school in our school system has a STEM lab and we know how important STEM education is for our students,” Barnette said. “So, we’ve taken a bus that was going to be out of the rotation of our regular school buses, and our maintenance department has stripped it down and created a mobile STEM lab out of it and we’ve got two retired educators that are coming back to work part time. They’ll be going around to each of our elementary schools and doing a mobile STEM lab with our students.”
It’s important to Barnette and the CCBOE that students are informed about a wide variety of career paths and he believes the mobile STEM lab will only help with that process.
“This was a dream that started about four years ago and our local maintenance guys have done most of the work on this and it’s taken a while, so we’re tickled to death to finally get it out there to visit schools. One of the components that we’re going to tie into this is career exploration,” Barnette said. “We want them to know about all the different STEM careers that are out there, and we want to start that process young. Any time you have to use your hands and create stuff and build stuff, it just raises that questioning and those critical thinking skills.”
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