After the final bell of the 2018-2019 academic year rang earlier this summer at Southeast Valley Middle School, Andy Peterson, the school’s industrial technology teacher, got ready to go back to class.

The class he returned to wasn’t at a university. It was at the John Deere plant in Paton where row crop planters and other agricultural machinery is made.

There, he was part of the Iowa STEM Teacher Externship Program. That’s an initiative of the Governor’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Advisory Council that sends teachers out to places where their students may someday work. The goal is to show the teachers what businesses and industries need in their workers so they can incorporate that into their lessons.

For Peterson, the experience has been a success.

”Since I’m a shop teacher, there’s something every 10 minutes here I could work into a lesson,” he told The Messenger.

His goal, he said, is to work through the program to connect kids to people in real world jobs.

He also hopes to combat the old stereotype that industrial jobs are unpleasant and perhaps even dangerous.

”In a lot of cases, we showed kids that working in trades is a dark, evil, disgusting, hard kind of reality,” Peterson said. ”And it’s just not like that.”

The externship program is an innovative way to bring education and industry together. We think that’s a good connection that needs to be made.

STEM has been a priority for Gov. Kim Reynolds since she took office as lieutenant governor in 2011. The STEM Advisory Council and related initiatives like the externship program were ideas that she turned into reality. We thank her for having the foresight to do that.

We also thank Peterson and all the other teachers like him who gave up a part of their summer vacation so that they could expand their knowledge through an externship.

And when the next school year starts, we hope Southeast Valley students in industrial technology classes pay close attention, because Peterson has a lot of good stuff to teach them.