LCPS’s newest Kenan Fellows soaring after interning at massive aircraft facility
A vast facility of hangar floors and engineering bays and computer labs became a classroom this summer for two LCPS educators intent on preparing their students for the jobs of the future.
Rachel Jones of EB Frink Middle School and Danielle Groseclose of Contentnea-Savannah K-8 School were among 36 teachers from across North Carolina and Virginia chosen as 2026-27 Kenan Fellows by the Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership at N.C. State University. Their selection was prestigious, the week spent at the program’s Summer Institute in Cullowhee was enlightening, but the bonus prize for the two middle-school teachers was their month-long internship at Fleet Readiness Center East aboard Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point.
“There was such a connection between the work we are doing in the classroom and what we need to be preparing these kids for,” said Groseclose, a digital learning specialist and eighth-grade math teacher. “We were constantly hearing about these 21st century skills we are trying to get our students to focus on – communication, collaboration, problem solving – and hearing that professionals in the workforce are dying for people who have these skills. That was such a huge impact on me.”
Fleet Readiness Center East is the U.S. Department of the Navy’s primary aviation rework facility for helicopters, vertical lift and tiltrotor aircraft. It is North Carolina’s largest maintenance, repair, and overhaul and technical services provider, employing a workforce of nearly 4,000, and it was a lot take in.
“I think we ended up talking to and touring departments with about 40 different people by the end of it,” said Jones, an eighth-grade English Language Arts teacher. “We talked to folks all across the different departments they have – logisticians, engineers, departments heads, people who work on the floor doing maintenance or airplane repair or facilities work, the computer science lab. It was just a really comprehensive look at what the 4,000 people who work there do on a daily basis.”
Back at school, the two teachers are translating those insights into new curriculum and aviation-themed projects, using classroom skills brought into sharper focus during the week-long Summer Institute in Cullowhee.
“I really liked it because everybody who was presenting had been a Kenan Fellow and was in the classroom still or very recently out of the classroom,” Jones said of those professional development sessions. “Receiving teaching advise from people who have taught post-Covid and have done this in maybe a rural area or with the kids we’re used to teaching – all of it felt very interesting and it was just really helpful, good advice.”
Jones emerged from the first phase of the year-long Kenan Fellows experience with solid ideas about adapting what she saw on the highly technical work floor at the Fleet Readiness Center East for a class that teaches reading, writing and communication skills.
“Everybody has to be able to read and write instructions and communicate what their work is to other people,” she said. “You can work with your hands –that’s a great career – but you are still going to need to be able to communicate what you’ve done to other people.”
To that end, she plans a unit on technical writing and has acquired kits from which teams of students will assemble simple drones, creating a step-by-step instruction guide and learning to explain the process.
Groseclose’s project – all Ke nan Fellows are required to complete one – will put her math students inside the world of Fleet Readiness Center East technicians. “They will have to figure out what’s wrong with this C-130 (transport plane) in order for the Marines to be able to get the supplies out for this humanitarian effort,” the teacher explained. “In order for them to figure out the problem with the C-130, they have to solve different math problems along the way, in order to get more information from different areas, different departments, like they would at FRC East.”
She also has hopes of connecting her students with professionals involved with the burgeoning aeronautics industry in Lenoir County. Fleet Readiness Center East operates a major aviation maintenance facility at the Global TransPark and Lenoir Community College provides training support for that operation, as well as for the Airbus Aerosystem manufacturing site at the GTP. Career exploration and workforce development efforts led by LCPS’s Career and Technical Education program increasingly highlight opportunities in aeronautics.
That connection is not lost on the Kenan Fellows Program, which arranged summer internships for all its Fellows tailored to the industries driving the economies where the educators live. Three other Kenan Fellows from the 2026-2027 cohort, all teachers in eastern North Carolina, joined Jones and Groseclose in the Cherry Point internship.
“The Kenan Fellows Program connects teachers to the industries shaping their communities. This fellowship puts teachers inside one of the region’s most important employers so their students can one day walk through those same doors,” Vance Kite, director of the Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership, said in a news release.
The newest cohort will meet throughout the school year, working with mentors on their projects, meeting more formally this winter and in the spring to continue their development as teacher leaders and, if so inclined, look for opportunities to Fellow It Forward, as they say in the program, to provide professional development to other teachers and Kenan Fellows.
“We will always be Kenan Fellows,” Groseclose said.
After being chosen for the prestigious Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership, Danielle Groseclose, center left, of Contentnea-Savannah K-8 School, and Rachel Jones of EB Frink Middle School spent a month this summer as interns at Fleet Readiness Center East aboard Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. They are shown with EB Frink Principal Dr. Michael Moon and Pamela Pate, a career development specialist with LCPS’s Career and Technical Education program.
