Redwood City’s new Design Tech High School has one of the greatest supporters in the Bay Area: Oracle. The school, situated on the grounds of Oracle’s corporate campus, officially opened the doors of its new home on Tuesday to 550 students who represent considerable authority in the investigation of science, technology, engineering, and math (the STEM subjects), and it will provide to take courses in life sciences, humanities, and other general scholarly subjects. Design Tech, or DTech, works as an open contract school in support of the San Mateo Union High School District.
At the event, Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz extolled the public-private community partnership between the corporation and the school as a way to bring the best resources to their students. She called the students ambassadors for the eventual fate of education, and said thanks to the DTech group for giving Oracle a chance to be a piece of their journey.
“It has been truly the highlight of so many employees and people involved,” Catz said. In her words, the school aims to be “a school where students learn not what to think but how to think, to learn how to see into the future, to design solutions to problems that are only starting to show up, and to mind their own imagination and intelligence to find a way to make the world better.”
While it might appear the students are preparing to work for Oracle some day, the organization said that isn’t the point. Students whose parents work at Oracle won’t get invitations for enrollment, the organization said. As a public charter secondary school, any student can apply to go to through a lottery. The proximity to Oracle gives students different advantages, as the organization is loaning out its transports to use as school transports, and the basketball team will practice at the organization’s wellness centre.
“It’s a long-term leap of faith,” said Colleen Cassity of the Oracle Education Foundation. “You try and make the best intervention that you can, and you do it in a way that is intellectually rigorous and you think is going to be effective.
