Which school district is best preparing students for college STEM majors this school year? It’s no surprise that it’s Seminole County. Parents there wouldn’t have it any other way.

When it comes to establishing a culture of STEM excellence in a school district, there is no substitute for great math and science teachers and excellent leadership at the school and district levels.

But that statement neglects the critical role that parents play in establishing such a culture. In the spring of 2022, I had a powerful lesson in the parent culture that forms the foundation of STEM excellence in Seminole County, which is Florida’s STEM superpower.

In July of 2022, I worked with a team including Teague Middle School science teacher Chelsea Holloway and Bay County high school science educator Denise Newsome to present a four-day Nuclear Medicine and Science Camp at Seminole County’s Crooms Academy of Information Technology in Sanford. We had space for twenty middle school students. We advertised the camp in March, and I decided to conduct registration by having parents at the four middle schools closest to Crooms email me directly. Once the announcement of the camp was distributed by the school district to parents at the targeted middle schools on a Friday afternoon I was overrun with emails from parents. The camp was full with twenty students by Monday morning, and I also had a waiting list of another twenty students. The emails kept pouring in, but I stopped counting and just responded “I’m sorry but the camp is full and we have a long waiting list”. In all, I probably heard from eighty parents in the first week after the announcement.

We had run these camps elsewhere and always had trouble attracting twenty students. At first, the intense response of Seminole County parents to the camp opportunity surprised me, but once I gave it some thought I realized I should not have been surprised. By themselves, teachers and administrators can only do so much. The Seminole County STEM phenomenon (and that’s what it is) could not happen without broad support from parents.

So of course Seminole County is still #1 on this year’s STEM Career Prep Index, which is intended to indicate how well each school district does in preparing high school students for college STEM majors. Seminole County has been #1 every year I’ve posted the index. The index is determined by calculating the percentage of students in each district’s public high schools that are enrolled in chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus courses and adding those percentages. Taking physics, chemistry, precalculus and calculus in high school is recommended by university faculty members and professional organizations in a wide variety of STEM fields ranging from engineering to architecture. This year, Seminole County is highest ranked for calculus enrollment rate, second in physics and is highly ranked in chemistry and precalculus.

As was the case last year, Brevard County (home of Kennedy Space Center) is ranked second.

The course enrollment and high school membership numbers for Fall 2022 used here were posted by the Florida Department of Education last week.