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Announcer:	Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals, who are passionate about the future of Michigan education. And now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh:	Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. This week we are joined in the FoxBright Podcast Studio by Doug Oppliger. Doug is the senior lecturer in the Department of Engineering Fundamentals at Michigan Technological University. He is also the Director of the High School Enterprise Program and that happens to be the topic of our show.
	Welcome Doug! It's great to have you on our show.
Doug Oppliger:	Nice to be here.
Rob Huisingh:	So Doug, take a few minutes to tell us about yourself.
Doug Oppliger:	Well, actually, I am from Port Huron, Michigan. I grew up on the Great Lakes and on the water. I went to school at Michigan Tech in Civil Engineering and then I worked in the marine-construction industry, for a company. I worked all over the Great Lakes doing marine construction and largely because of my wife had a career change idea to go in to teaching.
	So I went and got a teaching certificate and then I taught secondary math and science for about 11 years in Copper Country in the Upper Peninsula and then got a chance to start teaching in the Department of Engineering Fundamentals at Michigan Tech.
	I have been doing that now for eight years and then this idea came along a few years ago and it has really absorbed most of my time, and it's very exciting and now I am able to, kind of, put all those things together, my background in to this project.
	So I am pretty passionate about it.
Rob Huisingh:	So Doug, take a few minutes to tell us and our listeners a little bit about the background and inception of the High School Enterprise Program.
Doug Oppliger:	The High School Enterprise Program started as an offshoot of the Undergraduate Enterprise Program at Michigan Tech, which is a program that gets students organized in groups that operate like businesses and those students then are in-charge of budgets, in-charge of projects.
	Those teams are funded by outside corporations that were started with National Science Foundation money but now it's completely self-supporting, if you will, and it has become very popular, it has become a very popular way for engineering students to do their senior design work which is required for graduation, but it's not just engineering students, there are also business students, and communication students involved in those enterprises.
	The idea, basically, after the Cherry Commission Report, which came out several years ago with then Lt. Governor John Cherry's report on how to get the economy going in Michigan. That report charged universities to do more with in the K-12 world and then we came upon the idea of maybe trying this enterprise idea at the high school level.
	So we reformulated it, we wrote it up, we sent it out, looked for support, and now we have got The National Science Foundation money to get this going in high schools.
Rob Huisingh:	We are familiar with National Science Olympiad competition where you have students which are involved in competitions, how is this program similar, dissimilar to a program like The National Science Olympiad?
Doug Oppliger:	In the Science Olympiad and it is a great program, students typically do what I would call short-term small projects through a school year, getting ready for big competitions and then that's done.
	In this program, students are going to do larger scope, longer-term projects. One of our requirements is that each project has a STEM focus. So STEM is an acronym that's becoming heard more and more; it stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
	So each project needs STEM focus and the projects are long-term so that you might not even finish project in a year, it might take a couple of years. The teams in the high schools are composed of diverse groups, so we try to get them in as diverse as possible in terms of age, gender, interest in school, all those kinds of things.
	So it's not just science, it's lots of things altogether in getting these projects done.
Rob Huisingh:	In terms of this program, can you walk us through the fundamentals? How is it implemented? What do you need and what are you looking for?
Doug Oppliger:	That's a good question. What we are looking for -- actually what we have looked for right now we are, kind of, in a hovering mode but we have got some very dedicated teacher coaches out there who are in charge of these programs.
	We ran three school last year; as a pilot program. This year we have got five schools, next year we will start an eight school program, so we need a teacher coach who has some ideas for projects and then they will put together a team of students at their school and the students actually then will decide on the project, and what we do in the program is support this by paying that teacher coach along the same lines as an athletic coach, so that high school would have an High School Enterprise team with the teacher coach, a group of students, and then those students would build an identity for their team. So they have a name, we encourage them to get a logo and shirts and things like that, then they define a project that they would like to work on, again, with some STEM focus.
	Then they will spend the school year getting that project done, doing the research that's needed, purchase the things they need for the project and then in April they actually come up to Michigan Tech and present what they have done for that year during our undergraduate student expo, which is where our college enterprise teams are doing the same thing.
	So the high school students are right alongside; they get an experience on a college campus and that's kind of the culminating event throughout year.
Rob Huisingh:	What are the results that we are looking for?
Doug Oppliger:	Well, the overarching goal is to get more students interested in STEM careers and going to post-secondary education could be in STEM and we are hoping a significant number go that route, but really to develop a workforce for Michigan's economy, that's the overarching goal.
Rob Huisingh:	And what schools are currently involved in the program?
Doug Oppliger:	Currently, we have got schools kind of scattered throughout the state, we have got one local school, when I say local I am from Michigan Tech which is way up in the Upper Peninsula; so Hancock High School is right near us. We also have a school in Traverse City, Arthur Hill High School is in Saginaw, Michigan; Davis Aerospace High School in Detroit, right at the Detroit City airport actually, and then Utica High School in the suburb of Detroit.
Rob Huisingh:	What happens next, I understand that you are going through this initial phase of the process where you have up to eight schools which will be participating, what are we hoping to learn from these eight schools in this process?
Doug Oppliger:	Well, there is a reason that these are scattered across the state and in different locations, you have some in very urban settings, some in more suburban settings, one in a rural settings, and we are looking for best practices and by the end of this three-year study, this eight school program is going to run for three years.
	We hope to have a handbook of how this program works that subsequent teacher coaches can use to start the program and school administrators can use. We want to find out basically what's working and what's not working, where it's working; during this time we are also going to be looking for corporate partners to help support these teams and possibly give them not only project ideas but mentoring help that's another part of this program.
	We think of the High School Enterprise team as kind of on the top of the pyramid with three legs; an academic leg and university support, some corporate support, and then community support. So that could come in terms of like almost a booster club type group or a corporate group that has engineer, mentors, and those kind of things.
Rob Huisingh:	Are all eight schools picked or are you still looking for partners?
Doug Oppliger:	I have got a lot of interest from schools and we are going to go with the -- assuming they want to continue the five schools we have this year, that leaves three slots.
	One of those slots is actually going to be school in Puerto Rico when we wrote this to the National Science Foundation, there was an emphasis to try to get some wide collaboration going and we have an enterprise program actually a college enterprise program at University of del Turabo in Puerto Rico.
	So they are going to have to have a high school down there so that's six and then the other two slots, I believe, are known right now but I have got a much longer list of applicants than I have slots, unfortunately.
Rob Huisingh:	But this is after the first year. Now assuming that there were people within school districts that wanted to get involved in this and they felt that this was an important program to start though working in what are the steps that they can start taking, today, in order to start focusing on this and getting ready for this potentially to be implemented a year from now?
Doug Oppliger:	Well, I think, the first thing would be to contact us at Michigan Tech at the High School Enterprise Program and we can talk with them and what we would need then is the funds to pay the teacher coach, to fund the project.
	Again we could look for different -- we could help give ideas at least to look for support for these things. The teacher coach, as I said, is the key thing. So there needs to be someone interested in doing this, but hopefully some project ideas -- now I said earlier, the students actually -- ultimately we want them involved in picking the project, but in the high school setting, we really rely on the passion of this teacher coach to give the ideas for the project in their area of interest.
	For example, at Arthur Hill High School, our teacher there is a biology anatomy teacher and they are doing a project that deals with taking an area of their school that's, kind of, been left to go wild, if you will, and they are going to build a small ecosystem, kind of, in this cold outdoor area of their school and so there is a lot of planning, measuring, mapping, thinking about what native plants they are going to put in there.
	In Traverse City, we have a completely different idea where a team is building an underwater remote operated vehicle, which in itself is task but they are focusing on doing some really interesting things with it once it is built; some underwater photography to study things like zebra muscle, infestation, water quality, all kinds of things like that.
	So the project can vary, but it really relies on the passion of the teacher coach that's going to be hopefully transmitted to the students.
Rob Huisingh:	I understand you are going to be making a presentation at MASA?
Doug Oppliger:	Yes, at the end of January, the Michigan Association of School Administrators, we are going to present basically this information about the program just to let administrators know that that we are doing this and to let to know we really would like this to grow in Michigan. I am not sure it's right for every high school, but I'd really like to see a lot of schools and not only have basketball teams and football teams, but High School Enterprise teams also.
Rob Huisingh:	Well, Doug I want to thank you for taking the time to be on our show. It's been great to learn about this exciting new program and I wish you luck.
Doug Oppliger:	It was my pleasure.
Rob Huisingh:	If you would like to learn more about High School Enterprise Program with the Michigan Technological University, I invite to visit their website at www.mtu.edu. Again that URL is www.mtu.edu. If you would like to contact Doug directly, you can call him on (906) 487-2514. Again, that telephone number is (906) 487-2514.
	Do you have a story about something interesting that concerns Michigan education? Well if you do, I invite you to let us know your thoughts. You can contact us online at www.insidemieducation.com.
	Until next week this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
Announcer:	This has been the Inside Michigan Education Podcast. Comments are welcome through our website at www.insidemieducation.com or by email to feedback@insidemieducation.com. We hope you have enjoyed the show.