JPL laid off its K-12 education team. Now teachers lament how to fill the gap

If someone were to tell you: “Close your eyes. Picture a scientist.” Who would you envision?

Maybe you’d picture Albert Einstein and his unruly hair. Or maybe your mind would go to Marie Curie and her stern gaze. Researchers have found that students persistently picture older white men in lab coats, usually with glasses.

For years, the K-12 education team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked to get students to see themselves.

The team made hundreds of lesson plans around major space events. They facilitated workshops for teachers, created a high school internship, took meteor rocks to local campuses, and much, much more.

All of these activities were meant to foster the next generation of STEM professionals.

But during the latest round of layoffs at JPL last November, the tiny team was among the 325 let go. And though some parts of the educational program remain, educators across the country mourn what was lost.

For teachers, by teachers

Three of the K-12 education team’s four members are former classroom teachers. That experience helped them know what to do — and what not to do — to make their materials useful. 

Brandon Rodriguez, who’d taught high school chemistry and physics, said it was all about “respecting the limitations” teachers often have to navigate, including tiny budgets and being strapped for time. As a result, he and his colleagues made it a point to keep it simple and “keep it cheap” when they designed projects and lessons for JPL’s education website. And to align those materials with California’s math and science standards.

“We wanted to make sure that teachers didn't have to figure out how to get our stuff in,” said Ota Lutz, former manager for STEM elementary and secondary education, and a former math teacher.

The education team served as a pipeline, taking the missions, discoveries, and engineering innovations that happened at JPL and turning them into resources for teachers.

“There were these things that were popping up in the news, and kids were hearing about them. But they were happening so fast that teachers wouldn't necessarily have time to become an expert in the topic and develop lessons that would go along with that,” said Lyle Tavernier, former educational technology specialist.

“It was sort of, like, ‘OK, this is something kids are going to be excited about. How can we get this into teachers’ hands?’” he said.

Tavernier is especially proud of a JPL resource inspired by a meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, which challenges students to calculate the force of the explosion.

The team’s efforts proved fruitful. The JPL education website “drove about 30% of [the research center’s] annual web traffic, to the tune of about a little over two million visits annually,” Lutz said.

The resources she and her colleagues created have been used by educators worldwide.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, NASA landed the Perseverance Rover on Mars, in search for signs of ancient microbial life. The K-12 team created the Mission to Mars Student Challenge, a seven-week unit that teaches students how to design, build, launch, and land missions of their own — “using materials you have around the house,” Lutz said. When her team opened up registration for accompanying webinars, more than a million people signed up.

“We had participation around the U.S., all over Europe, Australia, New Zealand,” she added. “We didn't expect that. It just exploded in a wonderful way.”

'Design an alien'

One of the K-12 team’s biggest fans lives in the state of Michigan: Anne Tapp Jaksa is a professor at Saginaw Valley State University, where she’s training the next generation of educators.

Among other things, Tapp Jaksa appreciates that the JPL resources often weave in other subjects, such as social science and English.

“The materials [the K-12 team] created are just exemplary,” she told LAist. Many of the activities Tapp Jaksa models for her students were created by Lutz and her colleagues.

When Tapp Jaksa had the opportunity to go on sabbatical, she spent a semester at JPL. Under the K-12 team’s guidance, she created learning materials of her own, including “Design an Alien,” inspired by Jupiter's icy moon, Europa. The lesson is rooted in observations by NASA spacecraft, which found that the moon has features that are interesting to scientists who are exploring the possibility of life beyond Earth.

Tapp Jaksa’s lesson, designed for grades 2-8, teaches students about the elements that are required to sustain life. It instructs teachers to “Have students imagine what an alien plant or animal would look like to survive in the environment . . . Would an alien animal need to have feet, fins, or a radiation shield? Would an alien plant have a large trunk or huge leaves?” That lesson includes illustrated dice to turn it into a game.

An onramp for students into the sciences

Tavernier and his colleagues also wanted to push students to have a broader notion of who could become a scientist. 

For the little ones, “I wanted to show students examples of a broad and diverse group of people who are in those types of roles, to show that anybody can be a scientist or an engineer, but, also, to share with them that these are everyday people,” he said.

Tavernier loved when kids asked difficult questions.

“There's this idea that if you work at NASA, you know everything and you're a genius. And the reality is that everybody is there because they are passionate about what they do,” he said. “And so, I loved it when kids asked me questions and I didn't know the answer, because then I could say: ‘Well, I don't know the answer. Maybe you can look it up.’ Or, if nobody knew the answer, ‘Maybe you can become a scientist or an engineer and help us answer that question someday.’"

Following a lesson created by JPL's K-12 team, students at Carpenter Community Charter School used pinhole cameras to safely watch a solar eclipse.

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Courtesy Lauren Manning

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For older students, the team created a high school internship. Lutz and her manager saw it as an important opportunity, especially as budget cuts threatened such opportunities at NASA.

Lutz looked into which school districts had been allotted state and federal workforce development grants. She reached out to those within a 50-mile radius of JPL’s campus in La Cañada Flintridge.

“There are smart kids at every school,” she said, “and we wanted to work with students who may not might not have otherwise found their way to JPL.”

Over the last decade, Lutz and her team brought in summer interns from Glendale, El Monte, El Segundo, Pasadena, and Santa Ana.

“They just let us loose on this government facility!” said Pedro, a student from Santa Ana Unified School District who interned last summer.

“It’s always a blast going into the cafeteria and meeting with mentors, and then their colleagues, and getting to see, like, their life experience,” he added.

“There’s so much to look at here,” said Regina, also a student at Santa Unified. “There was never a dull day in this internship . . . You could just go into [a] building and be, like, ‘Hey! I’m an intern. Do you have time to talk?’”

For a teenager “to walk into a professional organization and work eight hours a day and be part of a team and be treated as a peer is a real shift from being in a classroom,” Lutz said.

When high school students first arrive, she added, “they're excited, but they're nervous. They're afraid they won't do well, or they're not sure what they've gotten into.” But by the eighth week, “they're walking around like they own the place. They are giving presentations to rooms full of scientists and engineers, fielding questions like professionals.”

JPL was scheduled to have another batch of high school students from Santa Ana in 2025. That will no longer be the case. (Santa Ana Unified declined to comment.)

When Lutz found out she was being let go, she immediately reached out to the district, before she lost access to her JPL email.

A source of professional development

Lauren Manning is a fourth grade teacher and the coach of the robotics team at Carpenter Community Charter School in Studio City.

She routinely takes students on field trips to JPL and makes wide use of the resources Lutz, Rodriguez, Tavernier, and web producer Kim Orr created.

One of Manning’s favorite lessons involves teaching students how to build a proper spacecraft lander — an essential skill when “touch[ing] down on the Moon, Mars, or another world of your choosing.”

Lauren Manning attended numerous professional development sessions hosted by JPL's K-12 team.

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Courtesy Lauren Manning

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“You have two marshmallows inside of a cup that represent astronauts,” Manning said. “And so, you have to drop [your lander] from a meter above the ground. And the astronauts can't fall out or get hurt.”

Manning loves lessons like these because, for students, “having something that they can touch, that they can see with their own eyes, makes learning that much more fun. And they can understand the concepts so much better when you're doing these activities, instead of just teaching from a textbook.”

Above all, Manning appreciated the K-12 team’s Saturday morning professional development sessions.

“First of all, it's cool being at JPL,” she said. “You're around like-minded people who are interested in bringing science into the classroom. And then we went right into the activities, where they weren't just talking about the activities, but we actually got to do [them] together.”

Rodriguez said those sessions were a way to share ideas in a way that also helped JPL. “We learned together, we found creative ways to make impactful content, to deliver it to students, and to promote science education.”

Thanks to Lutz and her team, Manning became certified to borrow meteor rocks and moon samples from JPL. She also noted that “Ota and Brandon were the first people [who] taught me about robots and coding at a professional development, and now I coach a robotics team that competes in tournaments.”

“That could have never been possible without them opening up my eyes to something new,” Manning said. “They've completely changed my trajectory as an educator.”

Students in Manning's class used paper cups, cardboard, and other everyday materials to design their own landers.

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Courtesy Lauren Manning

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In an email statement, Matthew Segal, JPL’s news chief, said that while the research center “cannot currently support teacher trainings,” the education website “will continue to feature updated resources.” Segal noted that it features “200 lesson plans, more than 50 student projects, and almost five dozen ‘Teachable Moments’ directly related to space topics.”

Manning said she’s nervous about where she’ll get that assistance in the future. “And I'm just really, really sad to not have their partnership and work with them anymore,” she added.

Lutz and her colleagues are proud of that effort.

“I think we had the opportunity to make a difference, and we did,” she said. “And I'm sorry we won't be doing that anymore.”

K-12 reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this story.