WORK CONTINUES — Construction work continues on the new STEM building, which is being built along Fourth Street. Officials with Steubenville City Schools said they — and the students — are looking forward to the opening of the building, which is scheduled for the 2024-25 school year. -- Warren Scott

STEUBENVILLE — Steubenville City Schools new STEM building is still a little more than a year from opening, but that hasn’t stopped students from getting excited about what it will mean.

“Our students are getting very excited,” Shana Wydra, director of SCS STEM/CTE program, said. “We’re actually hosting a career tech fair May 2 from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. All our career tech and STEM programs will be there, students will come through and see some of the exciting projects they can do — there’ll be demonstration and they’ll get to participate in some of the projects they’d do in that program. Each career tech program will have a business representative with them talking about the kind of jobs they can find in that career field.

The new, 28,000-square-foot, $16 million STEM building will connect to the existing high school with a catwalk, with a curriculum focused on preparing students for high-paying careers that build on science, technology and math, along with college credit learning opportunities. It’s slated to open for the 2024-25 school year.

“It will be done before that, but we want to have the opening when we come back to school,” Wydra said.

The high school’s STEM program currently offers aerospace engineering and aviation; global logistics and supply chain management; health informatics; innovations in science and technology; drafting/machining/CAD; multimedia and design/web design; marketing; information technology; transition to work; exercise science; and teacher education, along with workforce development training in phlebotomy and pharmacy tech in partnership with Eastern Gateway Community College.

For the 2023-24 school year they’ve been looking at environmental sustainability, clean energy and power, clean energy technology, integrated production technologies and biomedical sciences.

“We’re still on track for bringing in the programs we set out to bring in,” Wydra said. “A couple changed in some way or other — primarily the way we can offer program, being a traditional high school. But every year we do parent surveys, we do student interest surveys so we’re constantly reaching out and getting feedback, making sure we’re meeting the needs of all our students.”

They also work closely with business and industry partners to make sure students can find jobs and stay in the area once they’re done.

Their focus, she said, is to “just try to really provide our students with as many options as possible, whether they want to go on to college or into a career field, but they certainly can do both. They can do any number of programs and job opportunities; we want to make sure we expose them to as many as we possibly can.”

She said they’re also working closely with business and industry partners to make sure students can find jobs and stay in the area.

She said 350 students are enrolled in the high school’s CTE program, but she expects enrollment to swell once the new building is up and running.

“They’re excited about all the programs, that’s what’s really going to be great about the new building — we have so many student interests and we’ll be able to offer a variety of programs. I think students are excited, not only to have the opportunity to be in different programs but to explore different jobs, see what they like and don’t like. And even if they don’t stay in a program, we can at least expose them to them so they know what they don’t want to do — that’s also a positive.