 I am so incredibly proud of each and every one of you. I cannot believe that it was four years ago that you all walked through the doors as techies for the first time. When I see these students, I see myself. Some of the communities that these students are coming from, I came from the communities that were similar. And if no one had pulled me aside or talked to me and gave me conversation or helped me look at my future, then I would have fell in the wayside. Purdue University just welcomed its most diverse class in history. Big increases in first generation students, in minority students. But I regret to tell you that a sadly small percentage or number of those students came from the Indianapolis Public Schools. Something over 1,100 seniors apparently in this year's school system, only 26 of them qualified and were admitted to Purdue University and only 12 of them showed up on campus. And we cannot be the university we aspire to be or determined to be if we don't do better than that in the single largest concentration of low income and first generation students in our state. When for the third or fourth time I reviewed the completely dispiriting data about how few minority high school students, low income students, were even remotely eligible or qualified for Purdue, I decided we had to take direct action that if we waited on the K-12 system that we would wait forever and we weren't prepared to do that. This afternoon Purdue is announcing that we intend to open a charter high school to Purdue Polytechnic High School in inner city Indianapolis. When I met with the founding board because they wanted to think about who was going to lead the school I left them with the question of are you going to have a STEM high school and put Purdue's name on which would be great and be very successful or do you want to kind of fundamentally reinvent what high school looks like. It was that conversation that led me to believe that Purdue was really committed to this. They really wanted to see some fundamental change in the way that students were educated and again obviously opening up that pipeline. We planted our schools in areas where we were getting essentially zero students qualified let alone getting to Purdue. We are ready for a historic day both for Purdue University and for Purdue Polytechnic High School. This is the first day of classes. We have 162 freshmen who mainly enter the doors already and we're going to start classes here in about 20 minutes. I was a high school teacher many years ago and I learned a lot over my years that learning has to change in a very fundamental way. What you have to understand is that you are in a high school unlike any other in the entire nation. You have come to a very special place a place that we believe you and those who follow will make special. We have the highest of hopes for you but I'm already very impressed because you're here. You chose to be here. You asked to be here. We have given the people who will work with you here your coaches principal Jordan and others a really tough assignment which is that four years from now when you are the first students to receive a diploma from Purdue Polytechnic High School when you walk across the stage I want there to be an admission to Purdue University inside that diploma if that's what you choose to do. The reason I really enrolled at Purdue Polytechnic is because I wanted something different and I wanted to try My mom heard the ad on my birthday and then she just thought to herself well this is great it's all about self-directed learning about learning at your own pace about independence and she thought that is so Audrey. You know I've always been interested in Purdue University so you know I made that decision right then and there I was like I can either continue where I'm going or I can take a risk you know take a step and you know hopefully go to my dream school. It's very different from other high schools although it's STEM focused science technology engineering and math there are no classes this is all around projects project-based learning and students learn all these topics in a very integrated fashion and we believe it's very unique way of actually teaching students. Do you have another one of these that you could put here that would act as a like a fence? Yeah I got one. From the very beginning we said look we want the school to revolve around projects hands-on because we heard that when we talked to employers we heard it when we talked to high school students like they wanted something real but everybody we talked to out in the K through 12 world said yeah we'd love to do that but there's no time but what we said was if we flip it we could fundamentally say projects are the school. I can give you a book and I can give you all this information and you can regurgitate it and have no clue what that means but if I can explain to you how hydraulics work and then I can give you some materials and say okay make something that causes a force here to lift something of so much weight now they're actually making it and seeing the application and working in different modalities. So there was a cycle that we had where the problem was how can we feed nine billion people by the year 2050 and in that there was math how much food do we need to feed everyone in their science how are we going to grow that food how are we going to get the food there's also history if there were large spikes in people how do we overcome that and also English and communication how do we get this idea out there. The students come here and they understand that they belong here they understand that they're needed here they're supported here and they know that the coaches are for them calling our teachers coaches creates a different dynamic and your coach is someone who's trying to get the best out of you well that's what we feel like teachers should be looked at from our student perspective is that person is trying to get the best out of me and you're going to figure it out together and that creates a very very different relationship between the teacher slash coach and the student then you'd see in a traditional K through 12 setting. What I've learned about myself is that I'm capable of a lot more than I first thought my robotics team was able to go to worlds in our rookie year and then as we kept progressing and kept winning we realized that we are truly great engineers through Purdue Polytechnic High School you know we've been able to apply these concepts into robotics and really excel which has just been such a confidence booster. I really think the structure of Purdue Polytechnic High School has allowed her to grow and mature greatly because of the independence that's required and just that experience alone has helped her grow in confidence that she can manage and get around in the world. Purdue Polytechnic High School has definitely made me fulfill my potential there's been so much independent opportunities for growth here they don't hold your hand they're going to give you what you need to grow and then they're going to let you grow. I can hope at least that if we can continue to succeed if pphs continues to flourish prove that young people from these neighborhoods that were not going to college before can and do that it'll I hope motivate others to do things that aim at the same goal. We're not done growing yet we know there are other areas of the state where there's high need there's big big percentages of low income students big percentages of underrepresented minority students who have not been served well so we know there's growth there but what's been interesting is the attention that we've gotten from around the country there are people who are coming in to say we've heard you're doing something and it's interesting and we want to learn from it and so I think we have the ability to have influence on what happens particularly at the high school level where we may not be running the schools in other states but we can influence what is happening there we've shown it can be done now people want to learn from it and that's where we can achieve scale far beyond the schools that we ourselves would operate. The future for our students I think is just very vast they have so many different opportunities I think we open their eyes to a lot of different opportunities they wouldn't have thought were possible. There's not a gap in human potential but there is a gap in preparedness and that's the gap we focused on. Today we celebrate and I do mean celebrate the first graduating class of Purdue Polytechnic High School. Six years now I've been giving speeches where at one point or another I said something about this project and invariably I said I can't wait for a day when if somehow this works a hundred or more beautiful young people will walk across the stage graduate from high school and have a better chance in life than they would have had and many of them will come to Purdue University who would never have gotten there otherwise and that day is here now I want to say a word of the 40 Boilermakers to be who are with us for the last six years while this school came together and came to this moment the average number of young people we were able to enroll at Purdue from the entire Indianapolis public school system was 15 in one year you have multiplied that achievement by two and a half times it's everything we hoped for when we conceived this idea try to put this place together you have to understand Purdue University is a land grant school it was put there just as this high school was put here to try to open the doors to education into a better life and to provide access to opportunity to people who might not otherwise have it so the people I meet who made giant leaps from Purdue almost never came from fortunate or privileged or wealthy circumstances they came from small towns they came from farms and they came from neighborhoods like this and they went on to do fantastic things and you're gonna do the same what's next for me is to go to Purdue University I'm going to be majoring in mechanical engineering technology so I'm attending Purdue and I am studying robotics engineering technology computer information technology robotics engineering technology that'll be my major I'm going for my robotics engineering technology degree I'm looking at computer and information technology right now I'm planning to go to Purdue University and study mechanical engineering next for me will be Purdue University and getting my degree and opening up businesses and eventually coming back to Purdue Polytechnic High School and saying I did it I've said so many times the people here at Purdue look we're going to try a lot of things a lot of different things and when you do that they won't all work this one has to work and so far at least PPHS is working