Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Belleville Middle and High Schools: PLTW Distinguished Schools

Before Spring Break, Project Lead the Way (PLTW) notified both Belleville Middle School and Belleville High School staff that the schools had received 2018-19 PLTW Distinguished School designations for their programs. 

The PLTW Distinguished School recognition honors schools committed to increasing student access, engagement, and achievement in their PLTW programs. To be eligible for the designation, Belleville Middle and High Schools had to meet the following criteria during the 2017-18 school year:

  1. Offer at least three PLTW courses. 
  2. Have 25% (or more) of it students participate in PLTW courses, or of those who participated in PLTW, have at least 33% take two or more PLTW courses during their high school career.
  3. Have 70% (or more) of its students earn a "proficient" (or higher) score on PLTW End-of-Course Assessments.
Belleville High School offers five PLTW courses- Introduction to Engineering Design, Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Engineering Design and Development, Principles of Engineering, and Computer Science Principles. Seventeen of our students completed two or more PLTW classes.

For the 2018-19 school year, Belleville High School was the only area school to receive this distinction! BHS is one of just five public (non-charter) high schools in Wisconsin to receive the designation and one of only 426 PLTW schools across the country to receive this recognition.

Belleville Middle School joined a slightly larger number of distinguished schools- 21 in the state and only two others in the area (Evansville and New Glarus). However, besides the four distinguished districts in Wisconsin, BELLEVILLE WAS THE ONLY DISTRICT IN THE STATE RECEIVING THE DISTINGUISHED SCHOOL DESIGNATIONS AT BOTH MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVELS!

A HUGE thank you goes out to Mr. Ed Neumann for leading this effort in just four short years!  He is joined by Mr. Farrar, Mrs. Smith, Mr. Putnam, and Mrs. Swenson teaching Gateway and PLTW courses at the middle and high schools. Thank you as well to the school board and the voters for funding this initiative and creating a learning environment for this to occur.

Check out the congratulatory message from Project Lead the Way: