Today, a plan 7 years in the making comes to fruition. In 2013, I read a statistic that said the majority of students graduate high school having never completed a nonfiction text. When I searched this morning it on google, I came up dry but did find these scary stats...

Many of the teachers we work with voice that they are struggling to make science hands-on and inquiry-based while remote or hybrid teaching. But I have this vision for virtual science classrooms. I was a physics teacher, so I’ll give you a physics example, but it can...

A confession: I am one of those people who excessively repeats things I hear on NPR.  Last year, Mark Lloyd’s efforts to provide portable toilets to homeless Seattleites included the quote “If you have moral clarity, you aren't in deep enough.” Which I love. Or...

“This sounds great, but it's one more thing, and I just don’t have time for that.” In the past three years building STEM Library Lab, this one sentence has continually flummoxed me. Today I want to dive into the problem of “One More Thing.” As a teacher, this was me....

The problem, resourcing the under-resourced, is deceptively challenging. We sent invitations for appointments to the Teacher Free-Store to over 2,000 local educators in the last 2 weeks. Of the respondents, 92% have been from schools with an “A” grade on their SPS score. “A” schools make up less than 10% of all Orleans Parish public schools. Do the teachers at C, D, and F schools just not need free supplies? We know empirically this is not the case, so are forced to ask, what makes those teachers less likely to take advantage of a resource?

If you’re wondering what happened, we changed our name.  The Science Teachers’ Equipment Lending Library, while descriptive, was a bit verbose, and also factually inaccurate as we will service all STEM educators.  We are now STEM Library Lab!

On August 12th I set out on a 3,000 mile journey across the middle of the U.S. The purpose was to visit and learn about operations, logistics, marketing, outreach, and reporting, across a variety of K-12 STEM libraries across the country.

I originally discovered the NSEC while completing an assignment for the Changemaker Institute, which directed me to seek out organizations nationally doing similar work to STELL.  I found, among others, SwI STEM in Indiana, who advised me to attend.  And I am thankful that I listened.

When we left off, STEM Library Lab was preparing to write a Memorandum of Understanding, a nonbinding document to help validate customers and demonstrate that interest exists for our service offerings.

The Science Teachers’ Equipment Lending Library (STELL) began with a good idea. From 6 years teaching STEM subjects in high schools, I realized that one of the biggest challenges to improving teaching and learning might also be one of the easiest to solve.