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• K–12 education activities and initiatives are reaching many students that the API hoped to reach: From October 2014 to December 2017, program administrators reported that 48 percent of K–12 students reached by the programs were low income, 47 percent were girls, and 42 percent attended school in rural communities.
• Strategies to promote financial and programmatic sustainability included maintaining low program costs, finding other revenue streams, writing services into grants, charging for services when possible, and applying for additional funding from other funding sources. Some program administrators, however, believed they would not be able to continue if their current funding stopped unless they found another source of funding.
• Teacher professional development was a key aspect of API investment. From October 2014 to December 2017, 2,225 teachers received training by API-funded programs. Training included informal education, project-based education, collaboration with businesses, and implementing STEM curricula. Challenges in offering teacher professional development included enough time out of the classroom for training, competition for teachers' time among multiple training opportunities, turnover of trained teachers, varying state certification and training recognition regulations, and geographic spread of teachers.
• The API engaged in more connections with external partners now than in the first years of funding. API programs and leaders engaged in regional, state, and national STEM education initiatives and policy discussions, although they operated individually rather than with a common strategy. API K--12 STEM programs collaborated with one another, and the number of local partnerships and partnerships across state lines increased.

The growth in energy production in the tristate Appalachia region (southwestern Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, and eastern Ohio) has spurred a demand for hiring workers proficient in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This has created a focus on the importance of having high-quality K–12 STEM education in the tristate region, as well as on policies and programs to enable the supply of labor in STEM occupations and career fields to keep pace with evolving demand.

A challenge in the region is that the supply of workers with STEM skills has not kept pace with STEM workforce demand, which limits the region's capacity to benefit from national and global economic advances.

Recognizing the workforce and education challenges facing the energy and advanced manufacturing industries in the region, the Appalachia Partnership Initiative (API) was launched in 2014 and is committed to investing $20 million to support K–12 STEM education and STEM workforce development programs to educate and train local adult workers.

The RAND Corporation serves as the external research and analysis lead for the API, and, in this report, researchers assessed the API's progress from October 2014 to December 2017 in its investments in K–12 STEM education and initiatives related to catalyzing the community.