During his weekly address on Saturday, January 30, President Barack Obama announced his plan to expand student access to computer science courses across the country. In his upcoming Fiscal Year 2017 budget request, which is scheduled to be released on Tuesday, February 9, the president will ask for $4 billion in funding for states and $100 million directly for districts to train teachers, expand access to instructional materials and build effective regional partnerships under the newly announced “Computer Science for All” initiative. This new proposal, intended to specifically expand computer science at the K-12 level, would spread the $4 billion over three years, and $100 million in proposed discretionary funding. However, the proposal will require congressional approval before it can become a reality.
In addition to the newly proposed spending, the effort will invest $135 million this year in existing funds from the National Science Foundation and Corporation for National and Community Service to train and support additional computer science teachers.
President Obama has placed significant emphasis on the importance of computer science recently, including a reference during his State of the Union address. During his remarks on January 30, he said:
“Now we have to make sure all our kids are equipped for the jobs of the future – which means not just being able to work with computers, but developing the analytical and coding skills to power our innovation economy. Today’s auto mechanics aren’t just sliding under cars to change the oil; they’re working on machines that run on as many as 100 million lines of code. That’s 100 times more than the Space Shuttle. Nurses are analyzing data and managing electronic health records. Machinists are writing computer programs. And workers of all kinds need to be able to figure out how to break a big problem into smaller pieces and identify the right steps to solve it.”
Click here to learn more about the initiative on the Administration’s website. ACTE will monitor this and other information about the president’s budget request as it becomes available!
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