RAYBEN hosted the Shades of Blue President, Willie Daniels, and Executive Director, Adrian Clark, for a visit with the Raytheon ERG Presidents and Executive Directors to discuss opportunities to engage school students, by illustrating the connection between math and science at the workplace.

Shades of Blue have been reaching out to elementary, middle, and secondary school students to spark interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and also assisting in the education and training of our youth to become the next generation of aviation and aerospace professionals.

While speaking at the Aurora Public Schools, whose diversity make up is 50% Hispanic, 25% Caucasian, 20% Black and 5% mix of Asian and Native American, Shades of Blue discovered that the majority of students have never heard of Raytheon and the ones that have heard of the company do not know what it does. Raytheon is largest employer in Aurora and our students do not know us.

Shades of Blue has offered to support Raytheon to get the word out and have the ERG organizations go to the schools to show off Raytheon, give a road show, be a role model, tell the students what it takes to be an engineer, discuss opportunities and show off the diversity within Raytheon.

As a national sponsor of MATHCOUNTS and a creator of its own MathMoveU program, Raytheon is committed to reversing the trend around the nations decline of math and science skills. In order to help our company meet this goal, RAYBEN (Raytheon Black Employees Network) will continue to support Shades of Blue in getting tomorrow`s engineers and technologists excited by and interested in math today. We will engage school students by illustrating the connection between math and science, their passions and interests and “cool” careers. We are asking that the other ERG`s consider joining RAYBEN in this support.