The staff at Oak Park High School has extensive plans involving technological developments for current and future students. The school has recently received a three-year career technology grant to compensate for equipment funds for the new classes.

One of the new projects for the 2015-2016 school year is Project Lead The Way (PLTW), a four-year program available to incoming freshmen.

PLTW will encompass aspects of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and will teach students how to apply their lessons to broader, real-world problems. As each student progresses through his or her high school career, classes of increasing difficulty and pertinence to the child’s career choices will be added to his or her curriculum.

“It is a national project that incorporates a fixed curriculum, and that provides pathways into engineering and other science-based subjects,” explained physics teacher Ken Jones, who is highly involved in the project’s implementation.

Oak Park will also initiate the PLTW Engineering program, which will begin with a basic Principles of Engineering course taught by Jones and will progress in difficulty throughout the years.

According to Jones, the school’s plan is for one teacher to accompany each “cohort of students” throughout their high school career with respect to the engineering courses.

Even students who are interested in pursuing careers in a field apart from engineering can benefit from this program by building their skills in collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

“It’s the right course at the right time – there’s a demand for it,” Jones said. “We are at a period where standards are changing, and Project Lead The Way entirely fits with the standards.”

Further developments will also be appearing within the next school year in the classes offered to all high school students.

Oak Park is collaborating with California State University of Northridge (CSUN) to create an afterschool engineering enrichment class, for which students will receive two California State University credits.

“It will be a hybrid class,” computer science teacher Erik Amerikaner said. “It’ll be half online, and half in the classroom.”

A third project coming to Oak Park is Cisco Academy. These classes will be split between online work and laboratory assignments. In addition, the Information Technology Essentials class through Cisco Academy is scheduled to give either dual enrollment credits or community college credits to students.

Apart from technical projects that will be added to the school, the high school has also invested in upgrading classes or adding new ones.

One development will be the current architecture class, taught by woodshop instructor Kenneth Paulson, which will be further updated to include 3D printing and 3D architecture in its curriculum. In addition, Introduction to Robotics will be available for students to take from January 2016. Finally, a newly designed multimedia broadcast course will expand the journalism program beginning fall 2015. These new ventures will attempt to incorporate as many new technical developments as possible so as to allow students the experience of keeping up with the latest technology of the century.

“[Engineering is] the new focus that we are working on,” Amerikaner said. “It’s very exciting stuff!”