Charles City High School receives STEM grant

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

Charles City High School is just one of four schools in the state of Iowa to receive the PhRMA STEM Talent Pipeline grant in 2019.

The grant was acknowledged on Thursday, as Iowa state Rep. Todd Prichard, D-Charles City, joined CCHS Principal Bryan Jurrens, Heidi Frederickson of Innovate Iowa, and Elise Wingate with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in Jim Lundberg’s “Careers” class in Charles City Middle School.

Prichard and Wingate talked with students about furthering their STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education and the opportunities to apply those skills in the biopharmaceutical sector.

“It’s important for you — and for students all around Iowa — to focus on STEM,” Wingate said. “Whether it’s after high school or after college, we would love to have educated students like you to come work for us.”

Prichard talked about how the pharmaceutical industry has impacted the history of Charles City.

“You go to the museum, you can see how about 80 years ago Dr. Salsbury invented drugs to help chickens,” Prichard said. “Now that has evolved into the companies we have today in our industrial park, like Zoetis and Cambrex. There are a lot of interesting things to do in Charles City with STEM.”

The seventh-grade students were asked what kinds of careers they were setting their sights on, and answers included marine biologist, registered nurse, math teacher, ag business, teacher and conservationist.

Frederickson talked with the students about the economic impact that the pharmaceutical industry has on the state of Iowa.

“A lot of the careers you are talking about require STEM education, and your school has just laid a great foundation to prepare you with some of those skills,” Frederickson said.

The $1,000 grant will be used to support the various STEM initiatives at the high school, consisting of traditional STEM courses, combining math with an industrial tech course for real world experience in math and engineering, as well as growing technological pathways providing coding and computer programming.

“This will be a good investment,” Prichard said. “There are a lot of unique things to do here in Charles City.”

“We’re happy to make the investment,” Wingate said. “The resources you have here are really amazing, and we’re happy to support that.”

Lundberg, who teaches high school industrial tech, said the former wood shop at the high school is going to be converted into a STEM room, with computer labs, a film-making lab, a robotics lab and a bio-chem lab, among other things.

“By the end of the school year, I think we’re going to have the coolest STEM room in the state of Iowa,” Lundberg said. “My greatest hope is that from 3-6 p.m. every night, we’ll have an adult in there who can supervise and kids can go in there and do their own experiments and their own work.”

PhRMA represents the country’s leading biopharmaceutical research companies, which develop medicines for people.

Innovate Iowa is a public/private partnership that includes senior leaders from biotech, academia, business, health and other organizations interested in growing Iowa’s economy.

“I’d like to thank PhRMA and Rep. Prichard for recommending Charles City High School for the PhRMA STEM Talent Pipeline Grant,” said Jurrens. “This funding will help us provide resources and opportunities to our students that focus on engineering, computer programming and STEM education.”

“Our goal is to prepare Charles City students for careers or college, and this grant will help us continue to engage, inspire and empower students in the STEM fields,” Jurrens said.