On the second floor of a brick building on Branch Avenue in Washington, D.C., green and white signs celebrating innovation and professionalism decorate the classrooms of Digital Pioneers Academy, the first computer-science–focused middle school in the nation’s capital. One early afternoon, students at DPA worked on Scratch, an animation-based coding platform, to make a virtual cat move around in a box. When Crystal Bryant, one of the school’s STEM teachers, told the students it was time to close their Google Chromebooks—class was over—they groaned.

The school’s founder and principal, Mashea Ashton, has almost 20 years of experience teaching at and running charter schools. She grew up in New Jersey but has been in and around D.C. for more than 25 years, partly because her husband is a sixth-generation Washingtonian; he grew up on the street where DPA is located, in D.C.’s Hillcrest neighborhood. Before opening DPA, a charter school, Ashton surveyed more than 200 of the community’s families about what they were looking for in a school.

The survey responses were telling: Ninety percent of the families wanted their children to take a computer-science class. The Hillcrest families were clearly aware of the ways technology is disrupting the economy and of the importance of computer-science education. Walmart, for example, is increasing its number of self-checkouts and has plans to grow a grocery-delivery business. As robots and other forms of automation enter the workplace, the demand for workers who understand how to use technology increases: For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that software-developer jobs will grow by 31 percent from 2016 to 2026.

But computer-science education is lacking across the United States. Just 40 percent of schools in the U.S. teach computer programming; computer-science–focused schools, like DPA, are hard to come by. Some policy makers, including those in the Trump administration, have called for employers to look outside of the traditional education system, recruiting from training programs, for example, for the jobs of the new economy.