Richard Blais
Vice President and Co-Founder
Project Lead The Way®

Richard Blais, now vice president of Project Lead The Way® (PLTW), first developed the idea of a pre-engineering curriculum in 1986 when he was director of occupational education at the Shenendehowa Central School District in Clifton Park, New York. Blais, who began his career as a secondary school teacher and who also has worked as an engineer, recognized the need to build a homegrown talent pool to meet the increasing demand for engineering professionals in the United States.

Working with the New York State Education Department, Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Blais and his staff began a process of reviewing, developing and implementing a series of courses—called the Shenendehowa Program--that incorporated the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in engineering.  Believing that students learn best when they are engaged in real-world problem based learning, the program curriculum required the support of the latest high-technology equipment and software. To achieve this goal, Blais established an engineering advisory board of key stakeholders to garner support from leaders in industry and higher education.

Leaders at HVCC recognized that students completing the Shenendehowa Program were enrolling into HVCC’s engineering technology programs in greater numbers and the students were better prepared.  HVCC received funding from the Charitable Venture Foundation to create an outreach initiative that would make it possible for other schools to implement the Shenendehowa Program.  Blais was hired by HVCC, and through his knowledge of teaching and learning as well as the culture of K-12 schools, he was able to create the systems needed to adopt the program.  Focusing on contemporary contextual curriculum and the protocols for rigorous professional development, Blais lead the creation of the PLTW curriculum program. 

PLTW's mission "to create dynamic partnerships with our nation's schools to prepare an increasing and more diverse group of students to be successful in science, engineering and engineering technology" has proven to be exactly what the country needed.  Over the past decade, under Blais’s leadership, PLTW has expanded across all 50 states and the District of Columbia to almost 3,000 schools sites and nearly 300,000 students.  PLTW is expecting to reach 10,000 school sites, producing 1,000,000 students in the not too distant future, which will help to solve the nation’s shortfall of engineers.

Blais graduated from the State University of New York at Oswego with a B.S. degree in industrial arts education. He also received an M.S. and certificate of advanced graduate study in curriculum and instruction from the same university.