• Demographics (2019-2020 SY):

  • Number of Schools: 28

  • Number of Professional Staff: 1,491

  • Enrollment: 17,244

  • Percentage of students on free/reduced lunch: 35%

  • Students Receiving Title 1 Services: 13%

    On any given day, you can find SMPCS’s Supervisor of Accountability and Library Media, Heather Wysokinski, looking for ways to support her team of school-based library media specialists.  Part teacher, instructional partner, information specialist, and program administrator, the library media specialist role is complex. Their goal? Building life-long reading and learning habits in a digital age, by providing engaging instruction, resources, and services to their students, staff, and community.  This team of library specialists also understand that education engages students when it matches their interests and aspirations. Heather and her team are always looking for innovative writing, books, and tools that students and teachers both love. 

One of the tools they rely on to build strong critical thinking and 21st-century media literacy skills is Breakout EDU. Heather discovered Breakout EDU when she was a library media specialist at a SMCPS middle school. When it came to looking for a unique way students could strengthen their skills in research and information literacy, Breakout EDU fit the bill.  Designed by former teachers, Breakout EDU’s exciting, escape-room-style puzzles challenge students to use communication, collaboration, creativity, & critical thinking skills in order to break out. 

“At first, it’s so hard to not help them or suggest hints! But they are always excited to break out,” Heather said. When it comes to student-led problem-solving skill development, she says Breakout EDU is unlike anything else they have. “Whereas other platforms and curriculum that are three have directions for students, there is no direction for this.” With Breakout EDU, students have to figure out what the direction is.

When SMCPS classrooms shifted to remote learning in Spring of 2020, Heather’s team of school-based library media specialists gained a new responsibility: managing the one-to-one device program for over 17,000 students. 

As teachers looked for ways to engage students remotely, Heather’s team of library media specialists were looking for ways to continue helping students access, evaluate, and use information from multiple sources in order to learn, to think, and to create and apply new knowledge.

Breakout EDU gives her team two ways to keep students collaborating: a tangible, hands-on tool with their kits and now, the virtual platform. “This tool gets kids to collaborate on something outside of their typical reading database and it also gives media specialists a chance to see how the platform can tie into what the students are doing in media as far as research. Breakout EDU’s hand-on challenges present students a way to demonstrate. “And really, it is a kind of research skill. With a Breakout EDU challenge, they're trying to figure out the ins and outs of something and how it works, which is what research is about.”

There are over 1,800 kit-based and digital games on the Breakout EDU platform in a wide variety of topics and subjects, making it easy to find the perfect game for any lesson or classroom event.