Engineers week 2026 - Report

For the last several years I've volunteered (unpaid) with local schools for Engineering week.
I've gone to elementary schools and did projects with 3rd graders, spoke to 8th graders about career options, and I've worked with High school robotics clubs.

This year I had 4 Public Middle Schools on the list.
One was a rich town in the suburbs, two were inner suburbs, and one was an urban school.

Long story short the Urban school (which is very badly rated) never got the visitor paperwork in order for our visit even when we pushed the visit back 2 days to give them extra time.

I couldn't even make that up, their staff refused to do basic work for a visit (I had done their area highschool last year and that went well, so it's not like this was the first time they heard of Engineering week).

Couple things in common

In each case the groups I spoke to (~24 kids each rough estimate) were about half boys, half girls, all of the teachers were female. I have no idea how or why those kids were the ones selected.

In the competitions 4 winners were boys, and 3 were girls (the 3 girls were a 3 way tie at one school, the other two had 2 ties each as well)

Demographics, the suburb town class was entirely white and Asian (Indian much more than East Asian), their highschool puts them on tracks once they get there, so this was an introduction to basically STEM track for them.

The two inner ring suburbs were a mixed bag of white, black, East Asian, Indian, no one noticeably Hispanic (Which was weird).
Both of those have what is basically an AP track, but not specialized tracks for STEM.

God only knows what the other school has...

Compared to the highschoolers I visited last year who were really excited about AI, only one kid admitted to using AI (He's going to do well in life, early adopter).

I was happy to see it was a 50/50 split this year as it was heavily female last year.

The kids were interested in the talk, I talk about the different types of engineering and how the create real world solutions that we take for granted, universities in the area I work with, and answer general questions they have.

Had one kid ask if we could settle Mars without destroying it's environment...
I explained that it's an already destroyed environment and that to settle it, we would have to improve it.

Major takeaway continues to be that bad schools kill opportunities for kids. The difference between a rich suburban school that has the resources to start career tracks vs an urban school who's teachers see engineer visits as a bother is vast.

There were kids who were excited about STEM in all 3 school, but speaking as someone who went to a very bad highschool a lack of support holds many kids back. I'm sure a number of my classmates would have gone onto... maybe hold a job or not OD if they had went to a more elite school...

But that's something that parents should expect if they send their kid to a low ranked public school.
it's not even a money thing, those visits were completely free everything including the material for the project is given to the school, the teachers or administrators just couldn't be bothered.

Blows my mind.