Rockport wins $34,000 grant to expand middle‑school engineering pathway

Jody, the district’s director of teaching and learning, told the Rockport School Committee that the district was awarded a $34,000 expansion grant for Project Lead the Way at the middle school. “When I applied, they told me the maximum was 10,000. We got 34,000,” Jody said.

The committee heard that the grant will be implemented over three years. Year one will add automation and robotics (programming and robotics); year two will add a biomedical course called “medical detectives”; and year three will add design and modeling so students progress through distinct courses across grades 6–8. Jody said the sequence is designed so students do not repeat the same course in different years and that the pathway will feed into a high‑school capstone course requested by students.

Superintendent Mark Branko noted the district and principals are working to accommodate the new courses within a small high‑school schedule and to preserve required health and physical‑education credits. Committee vice chair Nicole Alterri and a parent speaker said Project Lead the Way emphasizes teamwork, problem solving and hands‑on work that remain valuable in an era of rising AI tools. “It was hands on creating an app… there was a lot of work done before that happened about how to think about problems that you would want to solve with technology,” one parent said.

The committee did not take a vote on curriculum changes at this meeting; Jody said staff will return with scheduling sketches and implementation details in upcoming meetings.