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Brookings schools expand SDSU and BioWorks partnerships for nursing and STEM opportunities
Summary
Superintendent Dr. Summer Schulz described returning SDSU nursing students working with early learners and a STEM collaboration with BioWorks and SDSU that provided recent graduates hands-on summer projects in fermentation and dye labs.
Dr. Summer Schulz, superintendent of Brookings School District 05-1, told Brookings Radio the district is renewing a partnership with South Dakota State University (SDSU) to place nursing students in classrooms and to provide dental-hygiene and family-focused health instruction for early learners.
"We're gonna have students in the nursing program more towards the tail end of their education, and they're going to be targeting our youngest learners starting even... preschool," Schulz said, describing how the placements provide clinical contact hours for SDSU students while bringing health education to families.
Schulz also described a STEM collaboration that emerged after a regional economic summit and brought SDSU and BioWorks together with recent district graduates. She said a professor named Ananda led a 10-week summer project that let recent grads work on high-level tasks such as fermentation and dyes "that we just don't have those resources to do" inside the district. "They're getting these hands on opportunities that are building their repertoire of knowledge when they're moving on," Schulz said.
The superintendent framed these partnerships as both instructional enhancements for current students and workforce pipeline development for the region. Specific program schedules, funding amounts and contractual terms were not disclosed in the interview.
