Clark Creek Elementary School Prepares For State STEM Certification Visit

Sign up for the Woodstock-Towne Lake Patch newsletter!

Cherokee County School District curriculum and administrative staff recently helped Clark Creek Elementary School STEM Academy prepare for a state STEM certification visit, as the school is in its second year of the three-year State STEM Certification process.

Clark Creek has been working on earning state STEM certification officially since December 2013, but actually began communication with the State Department of Education on this goal three years ago.

An ad hoc committee of principals and curriculum staff was formed in November to help Clark Creek prepare, and on Wednesday, March 25, representatives from the ad hoc committee conducted a pre-visit run through, one of the required elements of STEM certification.

Clark Creek will be completing the application for state STEM certification and submitting that application this spring. Upon approval of the application, a state certification team will be invited to visit in the fall of 2015.

Clark Creek is one of four STEM Academies in the Cherokee County School District and is the pilot school going through the state certification.

Not only do the other district STEM Academies plan to pursue certification, but Etowah and Woodstock high schools are in the planning stages for the high school STEM certification process.

The state STEM certification process is complex and has 15 specific components the state will review, including teacher collaboration, technology integration, STEM competitions, math and science instruction, and community partnerships.

In STEM competitions, Clark Creek had two teams advance to the state LEGO League at Georgia Tech earlier this year. One of Clark Creek’s partners, architectural engineering firm Enercon (also chosen as the district Partner of the Year for 2015), will feature its partnership with the school at an upcoming global conference.

Photo 1: Supervisor of Instructional Technology Debbie Childress speaks with third-grader Cali Northcutt about a Lego design.
Photo 2: Clark Creek ES Media specialist Madeline Hall explains the SMArTE Space she has created in the media center where students can design and create STEM challenging projects.
Photo 3: Dr. Jessica Porter, teacher on special assignment for Race To The top, observes students from Dianne Vergouven’s class 3rd grade class in the STEM lab.
Photo 4: Dr. Pat Kearns talks to students about their STEM creations in Christa Baggett’s classroom.
Photo 5: Woodstock MS Principal Mark Smith listens to Adam Layton explain his idea for construction design to his fellow first graders.
Credits: Cherokee County School District