KANSAS CITY, MO – Don’t tell Mary
Esselman that some kids can’t learn as well
as others because of the bad hand life has
dealt them. She’s experienced some tough
environments and knows better, and besides,
she doesn’t have time for such nonsense.
As CEO and president of Operation
Breakthrough, Esselman is singularly focused
each day on closing the “opportunity gap” for
more than 700 children from some of Kansas
City’s most underserved neighborhoods. She and
her staff of nearly 200 feverishly fill that gap with
before- and after-school learning opportunities
ranging from pre-K coding to high school career
training and dozens of hands-on experiences in
between. Operation Breakthrough also works
with the entire family, integrating educational
services with health and social services.
“If I don’t ever realize that there’s an
opportunity there, or I can go through all of
elementary, middle, and even high school
without exposure to any of that, I may not
develop any interest or any passion,” Esselman
says of age-appropriate STEM experiences. “But if
I start small, like in our makerspace for preschool
where we not only have a hacking bench, but
we also have kids getting introduced to coding,
building, and robotics, they start to become
self-directed learners who have the opportunity
to choose where and what they learn.”
Yes, Esselman has identified a symbiotic
relationship between opportunity gaps
and skills growth: elimination of the former
accelerates the latter. “The skills naturally
come if kids have opportunities,” she says
with an air of confidence.
THE OB AND PITSCO PARTNERSHIP
There’s a reason this fiery leader gets things
done in Operation Breakthrough’s sprawling
facility buzzing with children each day from
6:30 a.m. until well into the evening in one
of the city’s most underserved areas. Since
shifting gears to education near the end of
her undergrad years at Georgetown University,
Esselman has helped establish an education
program at a prison in the Washington, DC,
area, spent time in an alternative ed program at
Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, and
served as an administrator in Detroit.
Clearly, she knows what works in even the
most trying environment. And that’s why
Operation Breakthrough, founded 50 years
ago by a pair of no-nonsense nuns striving
to help children of the working poor, has
partnered with Pitsco Education to purchase
coding, robotics, electronics, and building kits,
materials, and curriculum for students from
pre-K through high school.
Hands-on STEM activities motivate and
inspire hard-to-reach students, she says.
“We set an expectation that they problem-solve,
they persist, and they learn how to
communicate. And then they start to think
about it. They’re tinkering, making, and
engineering. . . . You start to become more
passionate and you start to think more
about where your interests are. That’s a lot of
the work that we’ve done, and we’ve really
focused it on STEM.”
IT’S ABOUT EMPOWERING STUDENTS
Because most STEM activities are hands on
and project based, student-centered learning
replaces the tired traditional classroom approach.
“For the last 15 years, I have been very focused
on student-centered learning, which is when
the teacher becomes more of a
facilitator,” Esselman says. “When
the teacher’s in the center, it’s all about
the teacher, they’re making all the decisions,
they’re directing all of the opportunities. When
you change that system and you put the student
in the center, then it becomes very different
because then we’re looking for the student to
take advantage of opportunities, to ask questions,
to take ownership for making choices and
persisting through challenges, all of which makes
learning look very different.”
Empowering students who have few
resources at home to own their learning
through personal inquiry and experiences can
be a step toward a sense of freedom to pursue
and become whatever their hearts desire. “As
kids get older, they start to work on some
of these things, and they realize they
have more opportunities directly
out of high school on different
pathways,” Esselman says. “You
know, I can end up right out of high
school with a higher-paying job, I can
do more technical training, or I can go to college
– all three of which are viable pathways.”
Pitsco’s solutions pave all three pathways.
They open the doors to coding for early learners
(Grades PreK-2) beginning with Bee-Bot® and
Blue-Bot®, continue with Code Cube™, Fable,
and STEM Boxes as part of after-school activities
for elementary and middle school students in MakerCity, and then expand further with
Arduino electronics and circuitry and
TETRIX® robotics and programming for
advanced middle schoolers and, soon,
high schoolers.
KELCE’S 87 & RUNNING FOUNDATION
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis
Kelce, through his Eighty-Seven &
Running foundation, recently purchased
an adjoining property, formerly a
muffler shop, that is being transformed
into the Ignition Lab where high
school students’ interest engines will
soon be firing on all cylinders. Basic
skills in coding, circuitry, culinary arts,
construction and design, digital media,
robotics, visual arts, and more will be
honed beginning later this fall. Students
are currently building the Ignition Lab’s
mascot from TETRIX materials.
“Instead of starting with the
academic and then moving to the
project, we’re starting with the
projects and moving to the academic,”
Esselman said of the Ignition Lab’s
new approach aimed at ensuring
students discover relevance earlier in
the learning process. “We’re going to
start like, ‘Hey, look at all these cool
projects you’re going to build by
learning these tools.’ They’ll start with
really amazing, engaging projects.
We’re going to start with the process
and slowly weave in the academics,
so that by summer we can actually
offer courses in physics or geometry
or other things where you use all of
these projects to learn the content.”
BUILDING A STEM CONTINUUM
Pitsco representatives worked closely
with Esselman to ensure a proper
continuum of STEM experiences were
in place. “That’s kind of where Pitsco
came in is when they heard about
the Ignition Lab wanted to find out if
there was a role that they could play.
We looked at the types of skills that
one needs in electronics or additive
manufacturing or green tech – across
the gamut of what we’re offering – and
then we started to backward map it
into preschool and elementary and
middle school, deciding which critical
skills we would want to introduce. .
. . We had an opportunity to look at
some different tools in electronics
and robotics and just in general STEM
structures that we purchased.”
It was an opportunity for Operation
Breakthrough that will lead to thousands
of opportunities for the children they
serve and, eventually, a better community
in which they will live and work.
“That’s why STEM is such an important
part of what we do. When you’re doing
and you’re making choices and you’re
problem-solving, it allows you to become
a change agent in your own life and that
of the community,” Esselman says. “I think
the younger kids, when we expose them
to coding and robotics and some of
these areas, it becomes a habit of mind.
That’s why we start in preschool because
it’s just a great precursor to math and
literacy, but it also is a way of attacking
things. It’s an attitude that carries with
you through life.”