A meeting Tuesday with state education Secretary Pedro Rivera has Pleasant Valley School District’s top official confident the district is headed in the right direction.

Superintendent David Piperato said the conversation zeroed in on the need for school districts to fully embrace career readiness skills and STEM education.

“It was reaffirming to hear from the educators at the highest level in our state that we, at Pleasant Valley, are on the right track,” Piperato said.

One important STEM initiative will begin in the fall. Pleasant Valley High School will debut Project Lead The Way with the implementation of computer science and engineering curriculum and career pathways.

An expansion to the biomedical pathway is planned in 2020. Project Lead The Way offers a problem-based curriculum combined with a mandated teacher professional development component.

Students are engaged in a hands-on learning that encourages the development of problem solving, critical thinking, creative and innovative reasoning skills.

“As PVHS prepares to introduce Project Lead the Way next year,” Piperato said, “we should celebrate all of our efforts across the district to include STEM education at all grade levels. Providing our students multiple opportunities to “apply science, technology, engineering and mathematics in contexts that make connections between school, community, work and the global enterprise” will better prepare them for a rapidly changing world.”

In August, Pleasant Valley will also unveil the results of its “Profile of a Graduate” project.

A group of faculty and staff members recently completed a comprehensive process, including meeting with 30 members of the community.

“We are awaiting the final design and expect to release it when we return in August,” Piperato said. “What was most exciting about yesterday’s discussion was learning of our Profile’s close alignment with PDE’s recently released Career Ready Skills. As you will see in August, our design team hit the target regarding the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind our graduates will need beyond high school to become productive members of society.”

Piperato said Tuesday’s conversation also covered the need for vision, collaboration, engagement and trust within every school district. He feels in Pleasant Valley, those changes are already taking place, and addressed that in a message to staff and the school board.

“I challenge all of you to think back to two years ago and compare PV then to PV now,” he said. “We may not all agree at all times, but it would be difficult to dispute the progress we have made and the possibilities that lie ahead.”