Have you ever wanted a real-life experience for your potential career? Choose Spark!
Spark! is a Parkway/Rockwood program that connects student learning experiences with the real world, to “ensure students can understand and respond to an ever-changing world.”
According to the Parkway Spark! website, “to accomplish this task, we actively engage and work collaboratively with business partners, community service and educational leaders to design and develop mutually beneficial learning experiences based on the interests of students and stakeholders.”
Junior Ella Torpea is in the Spark! Incubator program and shares her experience.
“Spark! teaches us a lot about the adult world and how businesses and jobs work. Incubator is a class where you’d learn how to create a business, have pitch competitions to see if we could earn money for our business, and go on site visits like behind the scenes to see how they work,” Torpea said.
Senior Adam Woodrow is also a student in the Spark! Incubator program. He concluded that site visits personally were his favorite because it fascinated him how different organizations could have the same mission and drive, just in different ways.
“Incubator has made me more creative. Honestly with Spark! not just being South I’ve made new friends from both Parkway and Rockwood schools,” he said.
Besides the Incubator strand, there are other Spark! programs, like Bioscience. Senior Aggsan Raghei is in the Bioscience strand and states after high school she will be studying bioscience pre med to become a doctor.
“My strand is different because of our structure. In the first semester we learn stuff like common skills and body systems. Second semester is all job shadowing. I feel more knowledgeable and it made me fall more in love with health care and validated my decision to go into healthcare,” Raghei said.
Raghei said she finds herself the most challenged when she’s looking at case studies. Raghei also found out that she’s made friends from both Rockwood and Parkway schools due to Spark!
Erin Fluchel is in her first year as the teacher for Spark! Incubator. Last year she was an English and journalism teacher at West High. She reflects on last semester, this semester’s goals, as well as her goals for next school year.
“I have been teaching at Parkway West for 16 years, it’s only so long that you could teach ‘Lord of the Flies’. This has been a scary yet exciting journey for me as the Incubator instructor. It’s different because I am not explicitly teaching. The other Spark! strands do not necessarily have the role of teaching either. Our roles are to be a facilitator, our role is not to say here’s step 1 2 3 and 4, our role is to figure out what an individual needs and coach them, oftentimes connecting them with experts that could help them. It’s called ‘Incubator’ because the idea behind it is that we incubate business ideas. The first semester we focused on an idea that solves a problem, whether a service or a good we could create, pitch, bring to market, and potentially be funded for. Second semester hopefully we can either continue with this idea or pivot to an internship where we can continue to refine business skills.”
Some students are currently interning for companies like GoPlay, Jakapa, the Chesterfield Chamber of Commerce, Yarncom, B.O.S.S., and Accelerate Law, LLC.
Raghei had some advice for any student who is nervous about taking Spark!
“I would say go for it. It’s the experience of a lifetime,” she said.
