One of the most daunting impediments to Maine’s economic future in this age of technology is its lack of college graduates with degrees in science and engineering. A serious threat to the state’s educational present is its pressing shortage of math and science teachers.

The new partnership forged between Bangor High School and the University of Maine College of Engineering won’t solve these persistent problems, but it is a wonderful start toward a solution. The GK-12: Sensors! Program announced this week will bring faculty, and graduate and undergraduate student fellows from the college into BHS to work with students and teachers on some of the most cutting-edge research going on anywhere that just happens to be going on in a particularly advanced way at the University of Maine.

GK-12 stands for graduate, kindergarten, 12th grade – the eventual scope of this project. Sensors! refers to the largest research area at UMaine – research that encompasses all disciplines within the college and that ranges from theoretical studies to the design, fabrication and testing of prototype sensors with a near-endless range of applications; food freshness, public health, pollution control and national defense to name just a few.

This is important research in which the university has established a world-class reputation. In the last five years, UMaine sensor research has received more than 30 grants from government agencies and the private sector; one grant, for $10 million and related to detecting chemical and biological agents in warfare, is the largest grant ever received by the university. The three-year $1.65 million grant from the National Science Foundation that supports GK-12: Sensors! would not have been possible without UMaine’s established expertise in the field.

Bringing this expertise to the secondary level would not be possible without the close collaboration and cooperation between the university and the Bangor school department, from the administrative offices to the classroom. The list of those responsible for bringing this project about is too long to cite in full here, but the management team of Dr. John Vetelino, professor of electrical and computer engineering, Dr. Constance Holden, professor of spatial information science and engineering and Stephen Godsoe, chairman of Bangor High’s math department, deserve special praise for their foresight and commitment.

The immediate benefit will go to science-oriented Bangor High students in the form of a honors class in sensor research, an offering that will appeal to both high-achievers and to kids whose intellect will be awakened by doing real, hands-on research. From there, the program will expand to other classes, to lower grades and to other schools around the state.

And that will be the real pay-off. By every measure, Maine, despite its good public schools and good students, lags the nation in technological infrastructure: engineering bachelor degrees at less than half the national average; 45th in engineers with doctoral degrees; 47th in state commitment to research and development; 46th, and falling, in ability to foster technological innovation; and, as was confirmed yet again at an education conference in Orono last weekend, an output of math and science teachers that meets barely one-tenth of the state’s annual need.

It took decades of neglect, an almost pathological aversion by generations of lawmakers to investing in the state’s future, to get to a point where even modest progress, such as the recent increase in funding for R&D, still leaves the state falling behind. GK-12: Sensors! cannot change this woeful history. I may, however, be that single event Mainers years from now look back upon as the moment when a more prosperous future began.