As Amazon’s new headquarters makes its way to Long Island City, Queens, so will computer science funding to over 130 New York City area high schools.
Amazon will fund AP and intro classes in schools across five New York City boroughs. Of the schools receiving funding 30 will be in Queens near the vicinity of the new headquarters.
Amazon says the funding will take care of preparatory lessons, tutorials, and professional development for teachers. In addition, a digital curriculum and live online support will be readily available for both instructors and students.
The move makes sense for Amazon, as it tries to recruit and retain tech talent in the city, but as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez points out, this is just another indication of how other cities could have benefited from the tech giant’s presence.
However, the move also drives home how disappointing Amazon’s “HQ2” decision has been for those areas that lost out when the retail giant opted to split its “second” headquarters between Queens and Arlington, Va.
There are cities across the U.S. that would have benefited more from Amazon’s ability to fund computer science courses in their school systems. Instead, Amazon is pouring more money into an area that already has a lot of tech talent.
The effort will be supported by Amazon’s Future Engineer program, an initiative with the lofty goal of introducing 10 million kids to computer science every year while funding computer science courses for over 100,000 underprivileged kids in low-income high schools across the U.S.
Students will also be awarded a free AWS Educate membership which offers free computing power for coding projects in the AWS Cloud.
