Governing Board | Innovation

When you think about it, education itself could be considered a synonym for innovation, since innovation is all about advancement, improvement, and novelty. For every student mastering a concept – for example, that 2 plus 2 equals 4 – they are achieving personal advancement and a new way of looking at things.

Innovation is also about invention, about unique ideas becoming reality. Students throughout our PV schools are constantly crafting solutions to challenges large and small, resolving riddles, and figuring out how to make something better. Whether that happens at their desks, partnering with their peers, or letting loose in maker spaces, our students are always on the cutting edge of origination. Innovation flows from imagination and ingenuity and both are in abundance throughout our schools.

This school year, PVUSD is participating in a truly exciting initiative that will make our students’ imaginations fly even higher – literally. Collaborating with Honeywell, we have launched into the first phase of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), a national STEM initiative through the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, for which our students will design and propose a microgravity experiment to be conducted on the International Space Station (ISS). 

As noted by Honeywell Vice President and General Manager of Advanced Air Mobility David Shilliday at our kickoff gathering, “Every breakthrough starts with a question.” For our SSEP experience, those questions, the seeds of our SSEP experiments, will begin with elementary school students. Those questions will then filter up to middle school students, who will research the issues and formulate hypotheses around those queries. This mission’s final stage falls to high school students, who are tasked with designing full experiments that can be performed by astronauts on the ISS. 

The PVUSD flight experiment will be chosen through a formal 2-step proposal review process involving the SSEP National Review Board. After selection, the experiment undergoes a NASA flight safety review and potential refinement by the student flight team before being integrated into the payload ferried to the ISS.

Another aspect of this program turns it into a STEAM enterprise (one of our district-wide initiatives): students will be able to submit designs for mission patches that will join the flight experiments aboard the ISS. Historically, mission patches have made their way into space since Project Mercury in the 1960s, so it will be thrilling to continue this tradition with our own PV patch!

We are thrilled that our students will be able to innovate through this extraordinary opportunity and are equally enthusiastic about the other myriad possibilities for innovation that exist throughout our schools in PVUSD. Whether it’s culinary or coding, robotics or reading, academics or acting, or just about anything else that occurs in our classrooms and clubs and on our fields and stages, doing something new or making something better is all part of the PV experience.

On behalf of the Governing Board,

Anne Greenberg

President