Where It Started: Lefferts Junior High School
The story begins at the Gladstone Atwell School, also known as Lefferts Junior High School, where both founders studied, nine years apart. Michelle excelled in arts and communication, a major that required training in dance, music, drama, and the fine arts, including photography and painting, along with hands-on instruction in the school's television studios, on switchers, cameras, and the rest of the production equipment. Students had to learn to run it all. They broadcast over a television network through the Board of Education, and on radio too, traveling to the school on Tillery Street in downtown Brooklyn to broadcast over its radio network. Norman, meanwhile, excelled in mathematics and science. Lefferts made a profound difference in both of their lives.
The Founders
Michelle Renee Weston Fequiere began as a recording artist, working in studios with platinum-selling engineers and producers, and went on to become a broadcast engineer and line producer, working in television and radio, including Democracy Now! and the legal program Due Process. She studied video arts technology and multimedia at CUNY and SUNY, and electrical engineering, computer engineering technology, and biomedical informatics in the colleges of engineering at Essex County Community College and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Before and during her media career she worked in child care as an Agency for Child Development classroom teacher and in administration for Head Start and daycare directors. Today she works in digital forensics and cybersecurity.
Norman Alexander Francis, born in Jamaica, attended the same middle school and excelled in mathematics and science. After high school he served in the U.S. Marines, hoping to become an air traffic controller, and instead built a career in research and development, working as an R&D engineer on parts for an engineering company in New Jersey. He studied electronics at DeVry, graduated, and earned a degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he was later accepted into a master's program. He is also certified to teach technology at the high school level.
Academics and School Leadership
Academics matter deeply to both founders, and both were closely involved in their own children's education. Michelle served as PTSA president for a STEM high school, sat on a school leadership team, was a member of the PTA, and founded newsletters for a public school and for the high school. When Norman was laid off from his engineering job, he stayed home and became a steady presence in his children's academics, and he supported his wife through her master's studies. He and his wife supported their two children, Marquise Francis and LaToya Davis, through Operation Link-Up (OLU), a program in Paterson, New Jersey, founded by Carey Jenkins, that pairs students with mentors and guides them through college admissions and beyond. Both went on to Syracuse University. Marquise, a graduate of the School of Journalism, is an international journalist, and LaToya, who went on to earn her master's degree, is a marketing professional. Norman's support was a foundation for the whole family.
The Inspiration: Operation Link-Up
Operation Link-Up (OLU), the Paterson program founded by Carey Jenkins, was the spark for STEMM Kids. Michelle was hired as the camera operator and director of photography for a documentary about the program, working for a television producer from CBS, and interviewed many people on camera, including a student on the Syracuse University campus who would later turn out to be Norman's son.
Michelle spent hours on the road with Carey, driving up to Syracuse University and talking about her future, and his encouragement shaped her decision to start STEMM Kids. She saw OLU as a wonderful pathway that gave students the support they needed once they reached college, and began asking what could be done for children before they ever got there. Carey was close to the Francis family, and OLU is what brought Michelle and Norman together. OLU has since closed, but its example lives on in STEMM Kids.
How STEMM Kids Came Together
Michelle and Norman both served in the Sight and Sound ministry at their church, but they had never spoken until Michelle, while filming interviews for a documentary about Operation Link-Up, met Norman's son on the Syracuse University campus and later learned that his father served in her own ministry. In the control room, Michelle helped run the soundboard and set up equipment, and Norman did the same, along with the rest of the team that placed the cameras and microphones around the podium and sanctuary and ran the church's live online broadcast. Not everyone could serve on that team, because it took real technical skill.
Out of the conversations that followed, Michelle and Norman created STEMM Kids as a partnership, STEM Technologies, doing business as STEMM Kids. Michelle had set out to run her own licensed daycare, and it became a STEM program for children from pre-K through 12th grade. It has taught music, mathematics, robotics, electronics, and every area of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ever since.