Pennsylvania opens applications for over $5M in STEM education grants

Applications through the Pennsylvania Department of Education are open until Nov. 8 for over $5 million in grant funding to provide access to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

The grants are intended to help the next generation of Pennsylvania’s workforce prepare for the jobs of the future; the Department of Education predicts that within the next four years, there will be 157,000 more jobs in the state that require mathematics knowledge and 125,000 more that require computer and electronics knowledge.

The department has awarded $60 million in PASmart Advancing Grants since 2018. The grants go to K-12 schools, libraries, career and technical centers, and post-secondary institutions.

The program includes three separate grants: Distressed Schools Collaboration Grants provide up to $75,000 to help schools and school districts with limited STEM offerings; Education Planning Grants provide up to $75,000 to help communities plan local or regional career and technical education programs for STEM; and Innovation Grants provide up to $500,000 to help expand access to career and technical education in STEM for adults and K-12 students.

Judd Pittman, the director of the Bureau of Career and Technical Education at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, told the Pennsylvania Independent that there are a lot of types of programs that can qualify for funding.

“Maybe it’s a community that wants to partner with their local library and they want to open up a STEM maker space, because they want to expose our youngest learners to STEM-related or computer science-related experiences,” Pittman said. “Maybe it’s a mobile lab that can serve some of our most vulnerable learners, like families in foster or students experiencing homelessness, and we take the learning to them where they’re at.”

However, he said, the grant program’s funds aren’t unlimited, and it is difficult to say how many applicants will receive funding.

“It’s really going to depend on the number of applicants that go at large grants,” Pittman said. “So if they go for the 500K and we have 50 applicants in that space, the dollar is going to get eaten up a lot more quickly than if we have some folks applying for the distressed schools, applying for the planning, and applying for the larger bucket.”

Pittman gave examples of the jobs that Pennsylvania is hoping to get the future workforce ready for.

“We have a growing industry around manufacturing, products and resources to build the next fleet of submarines for the Navy, and that requires STEM knowledge, [computer science] knowledge — you might be running and working in an advanced manufacturing facility making one part or a series of parts that lead to the development of that particular submarine product that will then roll up into the creation of the sub,” he said. “Robotics, sort of this technician-space mechatronics. We have all of these warehouses and facilities that are leaning into automation, but you need individuals with the skills and the abilities to fix the robots, to care for the robots.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration has said it is continuing to invest heavily in career and technical education. A press release announcing the grant funding said his administration has increased funding by more than $53 million since he took office in 2023.

“Pennsylvania is really unique in affording these funding packages, and we have been doing this for a while, and I do think that it’s just a testament to Gov. Shapiro’s commitment to career and technical education, to STEM education,” Pittman said.