Bettis visits tech program his foundation enabled at Washington Park school
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Jerome Bettis looks at Adarose Ralston’s project during a STEM education program at Washington Park Elementary School on Wednesday.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Students Kar’zell Daugherty, left, and David Lloyd work on their projects during a STEM education program at Washington Park Elementary School on Wednesday.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Jerome Bettis interacts with students Max Clark, left, and Tristan Reed as he looks at their project during a STEM education program at Washington Park Elementary School on Wednesday.
Fifth-grader Lilly Hindman sat in front of a computer screen this week in a classroom at Washington Park Elementary.
“There was just a little bit of code that got messed up over here, and I deleted it and hit ‘refresh’ and ‘save’ and now it’s gone,” she said.
Lilly was showing off the personal website she’d been designing recently as part of an after-school program. On Wednesday, the roughly 20 students in the program got a visit from retired Steeler Jerome Bettis, whose foundation made the “Innovation Huddle” program possible.
“We went from the concept of coding to actually coding,” said Lisa Brand, the school’s technology competency teacher.
She worked with the fourth- through sixth-graders in the program for about five hours a week on Mondays and Wednesdays.
She said the program is aimed at teaching students about technology and other areas of knowledge that tie in with it, like entrepreneurial and problem-solving skills and leadership.
“We started with basic commands, what is coding,” Brand said. “But we also tied in that in our future, technology can be tied into everything that we want to do. … So we talked about, if were were to market something, how would you market it. What technologies would be useful to market something.”
Bettis’ The Bus Stops Here Foundation offered the program through a grant from EQT Foundation.
Bethany Vietmeier, executive director of Bettis’ foundation, said the EQT Foundation provided an $85,000 grant to pay for the program.
The gas producer’s nonprofit also donated merchandise, Brand said.
“They gave us – you can see all the kids have T-shirts and pullovers,” Brand said. “They also gave us incentive prizes for the kids. Each day, when they came at the end of the day, we would usually give a student a reward, and it was usually either like a Jerome Bettis Huddle T-shirt, something like that, or a gift card.”
Vietmeier said the program’s run in Washington was the inaugural one for the Pittsburgh area. It was originally started in the former running back’s native Detroit.
“The mission of the Bus Stops Here Foundation is always to impact areas that are a little less fortunate and 80 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced lunch,” Vietmeier said.
Silicon Valley companies are some of the loudest promoters of technology education. A larger pool of people with those skills will allow them to pay workers less.
Vietmeier said that isn’t a concern of the foundation.
“These kids’ skill sets are invaluable that they’re learning at such a young age and that they can be such assets to companies in the future,” she said. “So we think it’s more of a value added.”