PHS engineering academy certified

May 18 was Robotics Day in the Poway Unified School District and Poway High School celebrated with a very special ribbon cutting.

The ribbon cutting signified the official certification of the Poway High School Engineering Academy, which will allow students to earn college credit for engineering classes taken in high school.

“This is a huge feather in the cap for PUSD,” said Rodger Dohm, the coach of Poway High School’s robotics team and instructor for the Engineering Academy and pathway.

PHS is now one of 11 schools in the state to be certified an official Project Lead the Way certified engineering school.

PLTW courses allow students to receive dual credit, which counts for both their high school career and can be transferred to their college transcript with a test similar to AP exams.

There are two universities in the U.S. who will accept the credits from the PHS academy, and will in turn give the students college credit for the units, which can be transferred to the university of their choice.

“It helps them get into a college of engineering in university, and sets them ahead. They could walk in to college with an entire semester complete,” said Dohm.

The PLTW program is nationally recognized for all engineering schools in the country, said Dohm.

“Five or six years ago, we decided to have an engineering pathway on campus,” said Dohm. He said that while they chose the name “Engineering Academy” after much back and forth discussion, there is both an academy and a pathway available because students didn’t want to be locked into one or another.

The academy is a four-year program with PHS academic distinction which incorporates an internship and the opportunity to work one-on-one with professional mentors through robotics or Science Olympiad. The pathway is the same series of courses, but they can be pursued in any order or quantity and without the distinction.

There are about 50 students enrolled into the academy, and more who are doing the pathway, said Dohm.

Dohm said that there is already a student who has completed all the requirements and will graduate from the program, despite it only just being certified.

The academy gives structure to students looking to pursue a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics career, said Dohm, and can help them decide if they want to go into the STEM field. “There are over 100 different engineering fields,” sad Dohm. “They can go into science, robotics, biotech. (With the academy and pathway) they can experiment and see what interests them and what they want to be.”

In addition to the ribbon cutting, members of PHS’s robotics team 1622, called Team Spyder, gave a demonstration of one of their robots and handed out free ice cream and foam balls to students. The team handed out 600 ice cream bars.

Though Robotics Day was district-wide, it was PHS’s robotics team members that worked with lawyers to get the resolution passed, and brought it to the board of education, said Dohm.

“(Robotics Day) celebrates robotics and STEM throughout PUSD,” said Dohm. “We’re encouraging other schools to celebrate it too.”