In late 2023, the Fairfax County School Board voted to allocate $500,000 of the 2024 fiscal budget to partner with the International Society for Technology in Education to create the ‘Lighthouse Schools’ pilot initiative. The program is designed to test technologically innovative educational practices, such as the use of artificial intelligence. Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) selected seven schools for the pilot, including Madison, Herndon and McLean High School.
“We had to do a whole nomination package about our beliefs, where we are in education and where we think education needs to go,” McLean Principal Ellen Reilly said. “We’re being selected because of our forward thinking.”
On Friday, Jan. 12th, the McLean administration met with FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid and FCPS Chief Information Technology Officer Gautam Sethi at Frost Middle School for the Lighthouse Schools project kickoff. There, they discussed the effects of artificial intelligence in education and the ‘Digital Divide’ posed to plague education as a result.
To prepare for the meeting, McLean administration held a brainstorming session on possible improvements for the school.
“We met with our team yesterday and went over what innovation means to us,” Reilly said. “We’re putting together ideas throughout the week about what we would like to see in our school.”
One idea was the creation of a year-long internship senior program as opposed to the two-week Highlander Internship Program.
“I think that juniors and seniors should have an internship their senior year. I think that businesses and people from outside should start coming in and working with students and teaching them about the career that they possibly want to do,” Reilly said. “Then, in their senior year, one day a week, they should go to an internship.”
Regardless of which ideas are implemented, McLean administration plans to pioneer a new form of education.
“We’re kind of trying to think outside of what a bell schedule will do,” Reilly said. “We would like to start thinking about education beyond the bell, because we’ve been doing that since education began. We would like to start looking at what the student [body] today needs.”
