Three strategic areas define our work:
Talent Pipeline. We support development of a talent pipeline into the high-wage, high-skill, high-demand STEM careers in the Bay Area’s major industry sectors—health and life sciences; clean energy; environmental sciences; advanced transportation; and engineering, construction and manufacturing.
High school transformation. We advocate and support linked learning as the cornerstone of this strategy, which integrates rigorous academics with career-based learning and real-world experiences for students and teachers.
Sustained business engagement. We are dedicated to a demand-driven industry-led model which develops and supports sustained collaboration among our business partners, labor, government, and K-12 education, as well as important linkages with post-secondary education and training institutions. This employer-led approach is designed to close the skills gap that builds pipelines of talent aligned to dynamic business needs.
Bay Area LEEDS values Project Lead The Way (PLTW) middle and high school curricula which is reinventing the classroom experience creating an engaging, hands-on classroom environment that empowers students to develop in-demand knowledge and skills they need to thrive. PLTW also provides teachers with the training, resources, and support they need to engage students in real-world learning.
Being offered in schools throughout the Bay Area, PLTW provides rigorous, relevant, and industry-aligned year-long coursework in Engineering, Environment, Computer Sciences and BioMed which is second to none. Program-approved by the University of California, each high school course is rated a college-elective (“g” elective), and some can be delivered for art credit (“f” elective) or science lab credit (“d” elective).
Bay Area LEEDS values the Linked Learning approach which is a powerful system-wide transformation strategy combining four components including:
- rigorous academics
- career and technical education
- work-based learning, and
- student supports