NBC 6 is bragging about another school Monday – this time, we explored Miami Sunset Senior High School.
When a school produces excellence in the arts, sciences, and technology, you know it’s doing something right.
Sunset High School in Kendall is home to three magnet programs plus the two-time defending national champion dance team, Soul Street.
There’s a lot to brag about, says the principal, starting with two principles.
“First, that our students are career and college ready when they leave here and second, we offer a traditional, rigorous program where our students are successful,” said Principal John Lux.
The three magnet programs at the school are medical, communications, and engineering. Students in the engineering magnet learn how to build and program robots, they can learn to fly on flight simulators with an instructor from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, and they’re just started to teach drone piloting and programming. The kids are exposed to different disciplines so they can figure out if they want to become civil, mechanical, aerospace, or digital engineers. All of those fields involved problem solving.
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“It’s training for anything, it’s to get them to think, to think things out and do it in a rational way,” said Charlie Redlund, the lead engineering teacher.
The medical magnet program gives students the foundation to become first responders, athletic trainers, physical therapists, or doctors and nurses. We watched a class learning CPR as the classic Beegee’s song “Staying Alive” blared from a speaker. Turns out the beat of the music is a teaching tool.
“Because if I say you want to do a hundred compressions per minute, what is that? How do you do a hundred compressions? But if I say go to the beat of staying alive, you can know what a hundred compressions looks like,” said teacher Olga Malkin.
The communications magnet is fresh off the presses, starting up this school year. Students in the program learn print and broadcast journalism, website and magazine design, and how to write a blog.
Sunset High also has a robust dual-enrollment program.
“We actually send students each and every day on a bus to Miami-Dade College to take two classes a semester, so they come here in the morning, take a few classes, go to Miami Dade, take two classes over there and then come back to school and finish the day,” Lux said.
It’s always a busy day at the home of the Knights.
