Pearson marks 50 years of educational support

You may not know exactly what goes on at Pearson, a low-slung brick building on Owatonna’s west side, but the odds are good that you’ve used their product.

Those “bubble forms” that came with the Iowa Test of Basic Skills? Printed at Pearson – along with thousands of other  standardized tests, scannable documents and educational materials.

The Pearson Owatonna office has been supporting American education by providing educators nationwide with the tools to help inform everything from classroom instruction to district-wide programming.

Presses have been running in the building since 1975, and the company marked its 50^th anniversary last week with a celebration of employees, past and present.

Elizabeth Hanna, vice president of assessment development services at Pearson, knows it’s a bit of a hidden gem.

“I would say people probably don’t know the reach of the materials this facility has now,” she said during her visit to the site. “We send materials to 23 states and Puerto Rico, and the facility is also doing printing for higher education.”

But isn’t everything digital now?

Apparently not: Since Jan. 1, the plant has produced 100 million impressions – pieces of paper.

“A lot of the paper material now really supports the kids who have different learning needs,” Hanna said. “They need a special accommodation when they can’t engage with a computer in the same way, so they need that printed material.”

That includes large-print and Braille assessment forms, as well as the colorful product she’s watched roll off the presses in Owatonna recently.

“We have a new contract with a national consortium to assess students’ English proficiency,” Hanna said. “They’re just beautiful – but they’re for the educator to use to test” the understanding of new language learners.

“The question might be, ‘point to the blue hat,’ so it’s that part of the work, too,” she said.

In addition to educational testing, the facility also prints clinician assessments as the company expands to include different types of work done locally.

“We continue to see a need for paper accommodations,” said Trent Workman, school assessment managing director.

“But it’s not just producing the paper assessment – it’s also producing the results,” he said. “We print the results in a meaningful way, because it’s important for the family to know what to do with the information collected” by those tests.

Data gathered through the assessments they produce may influence curriculum and educational policies.

While paper doesn’t seem to be going away, neither does digital.

“We continue to see that there’ll be a long-term need for a dual-mode environment,” Workman said. “We’ll be a company that fully supports digital offerings, but always provides that paper component, as well, so there’s choice in meeting every learner where they are.”

The company is “investing in the work here, looking for talent to support the work,” he added. Multiple positions are open at the Owatonna facility, including management and key manufacturing  roles.

There are about 120 employees over two shifts, from full-time to part-time to seasonal.

“How fortunate to be able to celebrate not only this place and its work, but its people – who have sustained operations for 50 years, and will continue to do so,” Hanna said.

“What the people here in Owatonna do at this print facility really matters,” she said. “It matters to the students that are taking the exams; it provides the data that we give to the educators and the parents – so what they do here matters very, very much.

“We’ve been really proud of the work that we’ve done here to impact education across the country.”