Yes! KAST is completely free for the parents of our elementary school students. We get our funding from donations, business grants, and student-run fundraisers so we don’t have to charge our students.
Some schools prefer that there is an adult supervisor to monitor KAST sessions and help out the student-teachers. However, KAST has operated successfully at a number of elementary schools without a teacher supervisor present.
KAST is purely volunteer-based. We rely on the high school population at each KAST branch to keep the organization running. Having been said, each student-teacher goes through a training process before being allowed to teach at an elementary school. We make sure they are prepared to teach 4th and 5th graders. In addition, teachers, principals and students can review student-teachers at the end of the KAST semester, and we take those recommendations into consideration for the next year’s placement.
KAST offers a holistic approach to science. We believe in introducing students to all kinds of science, from biology to mathematics. Each session plan is composed of an information section and an applied knowledge section, usually consisting of an experiment or demonstration.
Typically, KAST has about 30 kids in each session. At some schools, they keep waiting lists for kids who weren’t able to attend that semester of KAST and at other schools, they arrange to have two sessions per week, in order to accommodate all the students who want to join. We usually have around five student-teachers at each schools, to give every student who attends our individual attention.
Our session plans are designed for 4th and 5th graders, however, currently, we are working on expanding nationwide to 3rd graders and middle school students.
While we do teach subjects specified in the state-curriculum, KAST tries to go above and beyond what is required by the state to give students a more intensive science education.
We always appreciate feedback, and if you have a specific subject you would like to be taught, we will try our best to incorporate it into our curriculum.
Because KAST has grown to be such a big organization, we have many levels of leadership. At the local level, our high school branches usually have a president, a few vice presidents and the general volunteering population. These branches typically meet once a week to discuss new developments and are in charge of individual fund-raising. However, we also have KAST: Nationwide meetings, which consist of the presidents from each high school/state branch meeting once a week. In these meetings, we discuss nationwide projects – for example, creating a KAST newsletter or expanding internationally.
KAST was started by Jessica Yang in 2010, an MIT graduate, in response to the educational budget cuts affecting elementary school science. She started working at her high school, Richard Montgomery HS, and has since expanded to 5 states. KAST Virginia was the second branch to open and was founded by Jessica Sun in 2011.
KAST was started in 2010, but became a 501c3 non-profit more recently, in 2012.