South Dakota Designs the 21st Century One Room School House

We have just embarked on our fourth road trip this summer in South Dakota. We first met this remarkably creative group in Baltimore during a seminar for Race to the Top funding in 2009. We have never lost touch and this year through a consortium of partners including Sanford Health, Mid-Central Educational Co-Op, and the University of. South Dakota the PAST team has had the opportunity to work with teachers from across the mid-state region as they strive to transform education.

Four school districts, Armour, Platte/Geddes, South Central, and Wessington Springs have volunteered to be test sites for for a new type of educational delivery that draws on programs already in place and new programs being launched as we write. Over the course of two weeks in July and August teachers descended on the Mitchell Technical Institute (MTI) and worked at a crazed pace with the PAST team to embrace the STEM problem-based learning process and plan out their district approaches for the upcoming academic year. Jill Weimer and Liz McMillan of Sanford provided rich lab experiences for the teachers to draw ideas from. The teachers provided the passion and determination while the PAST team worked alongside encouraging and pushing. The results were a series of great, PowerPoint presentations delineating the over-arching themes and wild and wonderful projects they've planned.

This week we've returned to visit each of the schools and the faculties. Today we visited Wessington Springs High School, Elementary School, and Hutterite Colony School. We saw some cool things and fun ideas. Did you know that Wessington Springs boasts an Opera House and the Shakespeare Gardens at the Hathaway Cottage? Carla at the town's cafe noted that their breakfast's are great and we concur. We were the welcome guests at the Travelers Inn Motel for the evening - a welcome site after a very long and much delayed series of flights in the wake of Hurricane Irene. Tomorrow we are off to Platte to continue the journey with the South Dakota Innovation Labs.

Sheli and Annalies