STEPPING UP

Greetings. It's been a while since our last newsletter. Our third and fourth quarters were full of events....something we gladly welcomed after two years of COVID. Seeing students again and interacting with educators gave us a much needed boost and reassurance that STEP is doing great work! We can never lose sight that "today's students are tomorrow's employees."

Pam, Vivian, & Shyrese

Thanks to grant funding from Pfizer, STEP was able to host the first ever Brick City Engineer Challenge at Rocky Mount Event Center. Fourteen elementary schools participated in a day full of designing, problem solving and coding. Pfizer employees served as judges. Congratulations to all of the teams and Bailey Elem.- 1st place, Bulluck Elem.- 2nd place & Benvenue Elem.-3rd. Who's ready for next year?

Over 150 students and coaches took over the Rocky Mount Event Center on April Fool's Day but no one was fooling around when it came to the competitions. Downstairs, students completed a literary competition, a design component and a coding challenge. Upstairs in the Nash Room, Invention Convention teams displayed their products and presented their business plans to a panel of judges. This event was made possible by our team sponsors and Suddenlink. This year's winners: Invention Convention, West Edgecombe; STEM Design Challenge, 1st place-West Edgecombe, 2nd place- Edwards Middle, and 3rd place- South Edgecombe.

STEP was thrilled to sponsor job fairs, Employer in the Foyer, in the high schools targeting our graduating seniors. The goal was to offer employment opportunities to students planning to enter the workforce after graduation as well as expose students to many of our local employers and careers. Hundreds of students participated, some with resumes in hand. Considering the feedback from this event, we will be back next year!!!