Contributions For Change With the Expansion of MAPS, new research has been made possible

Senior Charlotte Omundson finishes her schoolwork in the MAPS center. These tables are open to all MAPS students throughout school days as a way for them to work with colleagues. "I love working in the MAPS program because it's focused [on] the career path I want to go down, and the working spaces really enhance my productivity," said Omundson. Photo by Matteo Winandy

By Juliana Stimac

The district received a $4.9 million grant from the Moody Foundation, which is to be distributed over the next five years, starting with the 2022-23 academic year.

“There are a lot of people applying for Moody grants,” Director of Moody Innovation Institute Geoffrey Orsak said. “To get one is pretty amazing, but to get a second one, [that] is extraordinary.”

The total funding will be split up through all of the schools from elementary up to high school level, where the money will be implemented in separate ways to benefit students in new ways or continue old ways, like funding the STEAM coaches that were added into the elementary and middle schools from the first grant.

"There are a lot of [schools] applying for Moody grants... To get one is pretty amazing, but to get a second one, [that] is extraordinary."

The first Moody grant started in 2016 as a five-year grant and it was later extended to a six-year grant. After meeting as a team, they decided that the grant should go towards science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) education.

“It took a number of months to write the initial grant and to work with the Moody Foundation, but they were very supportive of the work and helped us through the process because we were new to it,” Highland Park Education Foundation Superintendent Thomas Trigg said.

After that bridge was already built, it made communication easier for a second grant start after the first grant expired in 2021.

“What we proposed this time was to enhance the [Moody Advanced Professional Studies (MAPS)] program,” Trigg said. “We still had some construction issues up there. There were some unfinished spaces to expand and [we wanted to] add one more course up there in MAPS and [in] the STEAM area itself.”

Because of the grant, new creative spaces in the MAPS will be added on the south side of the existing floor, and a new MAPS topic will be added. Construction for the expansion of MAPS will begin over the summer and have a ready space by August 2023."

"They were very supportive of the work and helped us through the process because we were new to it."

To narrow down the ideas for a new MAPS department, student groups that were selected through a google form were brought in during lunch periods to discuss ideas for the new MAPS focus. From there, the MAPS administration used those students’ opinions, so they could formulate plans for the new focus by the end of October.

“So once we are able to determine what focus area we will be offering next year, then we'll be able to kind of narrow the scope of what those areas will look like and so a big chunk of the money from the fund is [going] towards MAPS, specifically [its] construction,” Director of MAPS Micheal Warren said.

Alongside the expansion of MAPS, there will be the implementation of the Moody Education Solutions Accelerant, a research group that will focus on problems within practices of public education and will be focusing on two topics for two year studies. It will start this year with foundational math, or K-8, and dyslexia in all grade levels past reading. The focus is translational research, moving the data from the research from the laboratory to real life as soon as possible.

“We will be looking at publicly available data sets,” Orsak said. “[Those] are made available by either state agencies, state governmental agencies, or federal agencies that give us trends in math performance, for example, or in other kinds of performances that would be appropriate for our dyslexia across the curriculum study.”

The information gained from this will be wrapped up in an event called “MESA Summit” where educators from all over Texas are invited to Highland Park High School to discuss the information learned from the studies.

“Let's [say] math education [is what we are analyzing statistics for],” Orsak said. “We'll explore more deeply what options look best [and] most promising for classrooms so that these people from other school districts around the state and other decision-makers can say, ‘Okay, I can take some of this back right now.’ That's the goal.”