Southern Utah University in Cedar City has been awarded money from the U.S. Department of Education to encourage youth to prepare for college. SUU’s TRIO Educational Talent Search program has been awarded a one-time grant of $40,000 to support their STEM education activities.
“We have summer camp that we will be paying for the students to attend. There’s a health career camp, there’s a STEM camp, there’s some coding camps that we’re looking at,” said Tami Shugart, director of the TRIO Educational Talent Search Program at SUU.
“We’ll also be doing college campus visits to University of Utah and BYU and visiting their engineering departments and math departments and doing some activities there." she said. "We’re paying for tutoring for our math and science students that need additional help. Those are the big ones. We’re also looking at going to a STEM-fest over in Blanding at Utah State University-Eastern.”
Being able to support additional STEM training, says Shugart, will provide new opportunities to low-income students.
“A lot of times the populations that we work with – the low-income and first-generation students – they don’t have a lot of opportunities to be exposed to STEM-related activities, and a lot of careers are headed that direction now. We’ve always wanted to do this, but we’ve never had the additional money to do it. It’s more hands-on activities for them that we haven’t been able to do without the financial support. The only bummer thing is we have that opportunity for one year only right now.”
The program is currently recruiting low-income sixth through 12th grade students in Iron and Beaver counties.
