Pinecrest Academy of Nevada - Cadence Campus (PAC) is a public charter school sponsored by the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority (SPCSA). PAC has a culturally diverse student population of over 1800 students that make up various socioeconomic levels. In addition to the diversity, PAC services students with a wide variety of academic abilities.

PAC currently has 58 students participating in the gifted program, 262 students receiving a variety of special education services, and 40 students in the English Language Learners program. PAC has been working diligently to ensure that STEM opportunities and experiences are available to all students.

Our vision is empowering life-long learners to become innovative global leaders of tomorrow, we push our students for academic excellence through a STEM focused curriculum, but we also provide a school-wide positive behavior support programs. This ensures we are helping our students become responsible, respectful, and safe citizens of our community.

PAC has been a STEM-focused school from the start. PAC opened in 2016 as the fourth campus of a high performing charter network. Students were immediately exposed to course work in Aviation, Cyber Security, Coding, and more. Our teachers work collaboratively using the engineering design process to plan standard-based STEM lessons. We use Nevada Academic Content Standards (NVACS) to plan STEM lessons that are embedded with technology and engineering. For example teachers utilize the core ELA curriculum of Reading Wonders as a base and then work with students to explore science, technology, and math modalities to solve problems they are reading about in their curriculum. Our aim is to expose our students to real-world problems through these cross-curricular lessons. We are continuing to plan more such real-world based thematic lessons for our students.

Students in K-5 grades are able to explore their creativity particularly during PLTW projects and STEM lab specialty classes. Students have the freedom to create their own design while choosing the materials they would use for the prototypes. Our goal is to be able to increase the student preference and choice making during STEM lessons.

Students in 6-12 grades are exposed to STEM lesson tie-ins within their core classes. Teachers seek to make connections to real-life problems as well as have students work through the STEM design process in all subject areas as appropriate. All students have barrier-free entrance into a large variety of STEM-based electives. Elective focuses include Medical Detectives, Aviation Explorations, Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Physics and more. While students in 6-8 grades specifically have access to the exploration levels of these classes, students in 9-12 grades can join Career and Technical Education (CTE) tracks to gain access to college credit and industry certifications while in high school. All of our CTE tracks are STEM-focused and provide next-generation, hands-on exposure to practical work skills.

In addition to classroom successes, our students are afforded with the opportunity to expand their STEM experiences through extra-curricular activities. We have participated and excelled in the UNLV Regional Science and Invention fair each year. We also have many students who continue to raise the national rankings in the National CyberPatriot cybersecurity competition each year. Pinecrest students are also beginning their flight lessons alongside our aviation program to obtain a full private pilot license while in high school.

To continue providing and improving the STEM program at PAC requires commitment and collaboration from teachers, parents, students and community partners. The STEM Committee is comprised of teachers from each grade level who serve as STEM liaisons for their grades and meet on a regular basis to discuss and implement the STEM program at PAC. Parents get involved through our STEM presenters program, field trips, helping in class during STEM activities, assisting during Science Fair, and STEM Family Night.

Teachers deliberately plan standard-based lessons to incorporate technology and engineering across content areas to make these experiences exciting and continue learning for our students. Our main aim is to provide a foundation to enable critical thinking and problem solving skills at an early age. It is our goal that this preparedness will help our students succeed well into secondary school and also helps them in choosing STEM fields they may be excited about.