Photo credit: Roland Park Country School The Holliday Heine STEM Institute The Holliday Heine STEM Institute at RPCS, established through the generosity of Holliday Heine, an RPCS graduate from 1962, and her family, offers a comprehensive K-12 STEM program anchored by the engineering design p rocess. Students solve real-world problems by asking questions, developing solutions, and iteratively testing their designs. In lower school, this is highlighted by the fourth-grade capstone project, where this year, students designed a friendship bench for the playground. Teams evaluated potential sites, interviewed peers to incorporate their needs, and created prototypes from their findings. These skills are directly reflected in the upper school’s award-winning ACE (Architecture, Construction, Engineering) program. This past year, students collaborated with industry mentors to design a comprehensive nature center for the ACE Mentor of Baltimore challenge. They applied the iterative design process to professional-level tasks, including brainstorming through bubble diagrams, evaluating sustainable design materials, and creating 3D models. At RPCS, students develop and enhance their STEM skills each year, whether through designing tiny houses in middle school or taking the Biomedical Engineering Innovation class through their collaboration with Johns Hopkins University. The K-12 programming ensures that the curiosity sparked in early childhood evolves into the professional persistence required for high-impact STEM careers. LEARN MORE ABOUT ROLAND PARK COUNTRY SCHOOL This article is part of our 2026-2027 Guide to Baltimore Independent Schools ...read more read less