Hero Story

Jen Kuhowski is a high school teacher at Henry Ford Academy who has blessed her students incredibly since the start of the pandemic. Jen has helped her high schools' students navigate huge barriers. Most of her students come from marginalized populations without an established support network. Jen is part of the Geospatial Technologies Talent Consortium (https://migttc.com/) that provides 3 EMU college courses--9 credit hours--of dual-enrollment to her high school students. In 2020-21 when their school went to a virtual delivery model, Jen had to create a support structure that allowed her students to continue the college courses in spite of great odds. For example, the students had connectivity issues, their home machines could not run the ArchGIS software, and the virtual teaching was difficult to name a few. Jen was able to overcome all these obstacles, working long hours and into the summer.

Similarly, Jen supported her students so that they could have summer paid internships (last summer, 2021). Some of the internships were virtual and some were face-to-face. Some of Jen's students worked for local companies and others worked on a disaster project, mapping the new shoreline that resulted from the dam break at Sanford Lake.

Here is the link for one of Jen's students' story map: (https://arcg.is/0HqXSD0), https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8416b5f0167f459da1d30c4205e2f6a1.

To see the impact of Jen's dedication, listen to what her students got out of the internship experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=563gEve5lGU

The picture shows Jen and one of her student interns, who successfully completed an internship involving drones at Detroit Aerotropolis: https://www.detroitaero.org/