STEM Learning 24/7: Advancing STEM in Out-of-School Time

Chris Roe: I would like to turn it over to our last panel for the afternoon, but I'm hoping that we're saving the best for last, not to say anything against the first two panels, which I thought were amazing, but we have students on this panel, so we're going to hear from students about some of the amazing work that they're doing, and also hear from some of our key partners in this effort, and I think this is one of the things that we can really do here in the state to really move the needle in STEM education. So with that I'm going to have Milton Chen come up. I do want to give a brief introduction. Milton is an extremely distinguished moderator. He's the senior fellow and executive director emeritus of the George Lucas Education Foundation, which many of you know has won many, many awards over his tenure when he was executive director there, and really is an inspiration and an amazing resource for the education community. Prior to joining the George Lucas Foundation in 1998, Milton was the founding director of KQED Center for Education, which is the PBS affiliate here in San Francisco, managing KQED's TV programming, web content and education services for schools and families. He's also been a director of research at the Sesame Workshop, working on Sesame Street, Electric Company and 321 Contact. So, maybe Elmo's recent interest in STEM has something to do with you? I can presume? He chairs the advisory council for the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at Saint Vincent College and is a trustee of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. He's been honored by the Congressional Black Caucus, has received the Elmo Award from Sesame Workshop and the Fred Rogers Award from Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Milton has his AB in Social Studies from Harvard and Ph.D. from Stanford University in communications research but perhaps most importantly, on his 50th birthday he was named a Jedi Master by George Lucas. Milton Chen: Yeah, unfortunately that is the only thing that people remember about my bio. I've had some funny experiences with people coming up afterward and saying, How does that work? Is there an application process I should know about here? Is there somewhere I can apply online? And I just tell them what George likes to say, which is that, you know, That was just a film, it was just a movie. So here we are, it's almost 4, 4:30 I hope we can buy a little bit of time into the next session with the reception, for the student STEM Showcase. I know you've been sitting for a long time and I would like to make the point that, just as we don't want our students to be sitting, we want to take some time to stand up, please stand up. And use our bodies a little bit, as Ken Robinson says, we don't just want our bodies to be a way of transporting our heads to meetings, that part of the power of STEM learning is using your entire bodies and all of your senses to learn, so let's try, let's--this will be interesting. Let's try a little something, if we--you know how to do the wave? We just start in the back. We start in the back with the wave and as it moves forward, okay, try the wave and move it forward and then move it backward, try to move it backward and then those people in the back, keep the wave going, keep doing the wave, yeah. Okay and then move it backward and, okay, well that wasn't bad. Thank you. Please be seated and yeah, I've just come from a conference in Madrid where I think it must be 1 a.m.so I'll, I do want to keep us active in both mind and body. So this is our panel on STEM Learning 24/7, as the previous panels have alluded to, it's now possible to learn STEM at any minute and at any hour, it can be a Saturday morning, as the previous panel pointed out, it could be Monday evening, advancing STEM in and out-of-school time. I think it's very important to take advantage of all the learning time the students now have, all the information they now need to master is online, and I'm glad that Superintendent Torlakson mentioned the passing of Steve Jobs. Here's someone who started with that hobbyist interest in technology in his high school years, a product of California, in fact a good example of learning about STEM in his out-of-school time. You may know that as a young boy he, he and Steve Wozniak actually tried to build a device to hack long distance calls for free. Not that we want our students to be doing illegal STEM learning in out of school time. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club. Anybody even remember what that is, the Homebrew? Yeah, okay, there's a few people, early hobbyists looking at the, the beginnings of the personal computer movement. So, I do think the challenge for us is to try to figure out how to take advantage of all the time students have, how to create the next generation of Steve Jobses here to fuel our economy, you heard the first panel on the work force and our economy here in California. So we've got a great panel and I'm very pleased that we have a couple of students as part of it. Let me introduce them all to you briefly, starting on your far left. Andee Press-Dawson, executive director of the California Afterschool Network. She's been with the CRESS Center of the School of Education here in UC Davis for four years, and has her background and master's degree in social work with an emphasis in community organization, very helpful in the afterschool space. She has extensive experience in the afterschool world, having served as director of Sacramento START for the city of Sacramento for six years, and also founded the Kids on Kampus Children's Enrichment Program, and has started a children's museum, a children's museum called the Visionarium Children's Museum. And then to her left, Onda Johnson is the education administrator for the after-school division of the California Department of Education. She also has extensive background in education administration and, an interesting piece of her background, as an auditor in the department of finance. She also has a background in criminal justice and, as I mentioned, public administration, Onda Johnson. Ron Ottinger is the executive director of the Noyce Foundation Silicon Valley, and for 14 years he was the national associate director of the nonprofit AVID Center. Any of you familiar with AVID? There you go. Ron did a great job in building AVID from what? A program with--in his base in San Diego to more than 40 states and 15 countries, reaching nearly 200,000 students and close to 3,000 middle and high schools. He also has a background on the San Diego city schools board of education, and has authored the classrooms' first policy which reallocated local funds to reduce class size in 1993. And then to his left, Julia Roche is a senior in high school at High Tech High in Chula Vista, one of our best examples of project-based learning, merging the arts and technology. Whenever I'm in front of a STEM group I like to say, let's not forget the arts. Let's put the A in STEM and when I'm with arts groups, let's make it STEAM. When I'm with arts group I say, let's not forget about STEM. Let's look at that connection between the humanities and STEM. So she attends one of the best high schools that's doing this. I will read you a little more about their background because, if you have any doubts about the future of California just look at these two students here very quickly. She has been a participant on the San Diego Science Alliance Program called BE WiSE, which stands for Better Education for Women in Science and Engineering. She has participated on multiple science-related workshops and academies, her favorite being the Oncofertility Saturday Academy. This is an eight- week summer program, allowed her to study oncofertility, the preservation in cancer treatment of a patient's fertility, weekly labs at places such as the UCSD Moores Center. She's also participated in two separate internships, due to her connections through BE WiSE and her high school. The first was a four-week-long internship at the UCSD Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where she researched special proteins in sea urchins. Second was an eight-week-long internship at Space and Naval Warfare, where she worked in the robotics lab, and she'll be majoring in engineering, we believe, at a four-year university, and anyone here from UC Davis, you better snap her up immediately. That's Julia Roche and then finally, Homin Kwark, and, I don't know what you were doing when you were a senior in high school or a sophomore in high school, I was mainly trying to figure out how to get a driver's license and a date for the senior prom. Homin Kwark is the founder and CEO of Imagiscience. He's a junior at Northwood High School in Irvine, California. This is an organization that presents the world of science to students through events, challenges, programs and competitions. Imagiscience is one of the first student-led coalitions that'd been formed by the very high school students they were trying to teach. Just to go on a bit and their bios are in the back of the program. During his medical internship in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, he launched a medical-outreach program at a state orphanage center. He also served as the artistic director of Filial Piety Senior Care Center, and in addition he was invited to perform Korean traditional performance at Disneyland and the Hollywood Bowl and, in his spare time, he enjoys playing the trumpet and the piano. So there is hope for California, we just need a few more million students like these two. [Applause] But let's start with Andee Press-Dawson. I'm going to ask each of you a question or two and come down the panel and then also we have some general conversation, in turn, to your questions, but Andee, what exactly is the STEM in Out-of-School Time Initiative and why is it such an important and powerful new effort? Andee Press-Dawson: Thank you. I will say one of the better things I did with this initiative is I found Milton. He was a keynote speaker at our MATT meeting, where all of the after-school networks were meeting, and he was talking about his wonderful book Education Nation and I went up to him afterward and I said, I'm from California and we're about to kick off this STEM in Out-of-School Time Initiative, would you be interested? Just kind of open-ended--and without blinking he said, Absolutely, whatever I can do to help I'm there. And I will say we feel so honored to have Milton as part of our work and as I talk about where we're headed, we've built him in as a big part but it just, I think, shows how anxious people are to get involved with this issue, and that we have the resources here in California. Our Out-of-School Initiative is really building upon this incredible infrastructure that we have in California, with our after-school programs. We're the only state in the country that has put this kind of state dollars into the Out-of-School time space. We have 4,000 programs, elementary, middle and high school, that exist here and they are all in our high poverty schools, which is exactly the demographic we're hoping to reach here with our STEM initiative. So, about a year and a half ago, three very committed and generous private funders saw that this was important, and working very closely with CSL net who had out-of-school time as one of their important pillars to what they were trying to do, we all began to work together. And we took a year to vision and vision some more and gather together some of the best thinkers in California, from the informal science world, the afterschool world, the education field, State Department of Education. We brought everybody together to really look at what this should look like in California. We wrote a strategic plan, we now have a strategic plan and we are about on the verge of submitting our final proposal to our funders to get this going in out-of-school time in California. So it's not a dream it's a reality that's about to happen, and we knew there was going to be, sort of, a break between our planning process and our implementation, so we looked to our friends at the California Department of Education and once Tom Torlakson entered the picture STEM again became a priority, and they asked if we could do something around our initiative. And so we created Jump-start STEM in Out-of-School Time. So I am pleased to announce it happened, and October 3rd we launched our first after school site that's doing STEM. Our goal that we are going to have trained in the next month with professional development opportunities are 300 after school sites in California, which will impact about 18,000 young people. We have curriculum that we've selected, we selected sites. They got to choose what curriculum they were interested in. We have a team of professional development people from the California Afterschool network, who will be going out there helping them with their curriculum, providing on-going coaching, mentoring, and making this happen. The other thing that Milton is going to be helping us with is right here at UC Davis, we'll have the Virtual Innovation Center for STEM in Out-of-School Time, which will have resources for anyone and everyone across the state to be able to tap into, curriculum resources, professional development, on-line tools. So the exciting thing is that, we see the out-of-school space as the perfect place to do things quickly. Our after school programs align with the regular school day. They're sitting on school campuses or close to school campus, by virtue of their funding they have to have a relationship with their regular school day teachers. We're not sitting in isolation. So our hope is, we can spark all this innovation happening during the out-of-school space, and that that again will impact the regular teachers. They can be part of this and I can honestly say it's happening right now. So we're very excited about that. Chen: Great! Onda tell us some more about how the, the CDE is advancing STEM in Out-of-School Time, and maybe a little bit about how the funding flows and then also, how your thinking is evolving around bridging between out-of-school and in school? Onda Johnson: Now? In terms of where we're going with STEM in after school Andee, you know, highlighted the most important pieces of that and understanding that it's a priority for the, not just the State Department but for the federal government also and so, we looked at the opportunities. What opportunities could we offer to students in this space of three hours that equates to, I think Andee will help me with that, 70 days, 70 additional days in the school year and 4,000 grantees that we currently have, over 4,000 grantees that we currently have, that have these students in their programs that they're currently providing some type of service to, in academic support and enrichment. So we looked at what could we do as a State Department to, kind of, move this effort along? Knowing that at some point we were going to require to look at this and see, you know, what we were going to need to do in order to support the federal government and also move the state initiative along. So when Tom Torlakson came to the State Department, he came there with a vision or an idea about really heightening the level of awareness of after school to ensure that students receive the additional time that they need to expand their learning opportunities and so STEM is definitely at the top of his list and we looked at, again, what could we do, so we turned to our partners. There are a lot of opportunity in terms of the subject matter and there's a lot of very qualified people in the industry already but we wanted to partner with the network to be able to do something that was kind of more innovative and something that would be, that would spark possibly the way we move in After-School from this point on so the pilot project that Andee mentioned was our way of engaging After- School in STEM service learning. STEM learning, I'm sorry. Chen: Great. So Ron Ottinger, why are foundations interested in STEM in Out-of -school and specifically the interest of the Noyce Foundation, what are your plans in this area and how do you plan to maybe partner with other foundations as well? Ron Ottinger: Thanks, Milton, and thank you also for letting the adults go before the kids. One thing I learned chairing the San Diego City School Board for seven of my 12 years on the board is never follow students. They definitely will shine and will make all of this comprehensible from the ground up. This is a perfect time for us to be hosting this session because, imagine you're a kid, you've been in school for six hours. Here you are at the end of the day. You're a little tired, you're a little distracted, you're on your gadgets, so the fact that, in California, really leading the nation in this after-school work, that we've been able to accomplish so much to inspire kids in various realms is truly incredible. At the Noyce Foundation, which was founded in the memory of Bob Noyce, the co-founder of Intel and the inventor of the integrated circuit, this is what we're all about. When the report came out that Dennis Bartels referred to, we were thrilled. Because we think science is the one place where you can't do it in school alone and you can't do it out-of-school alone. It's the one subject where you need both. If kids are not inspired to learn science as the woman from Apple said earlier, if they don't see it as fun, they don't see it as cool, they don't see the relevance that science is all around them, if they don't connect to science, they won't care to learn it in school and what we'll get is what we've always had, a small slice of kids who go on in the STEM majors and STEM careers. So for us, we see this as a unique opportunity, a unique moment to bring the out-of-school resources of various kinds. Not just the for H's and those that are in organizations but those that you can get from the internet, those that are from media, from so many different sources to really inspire and help kids understand why science technology, engineering and math are so important. For us as a foundation, we see in California a lot of assets. We've got a lot of assets whether it be in corporations, whether it be in the higher Ed, whether it be in the non-profit sector, whether it be in K-12, we have a lot of assets. The challenge is, is that they're not organized. There are a lot of one-off projects that aren't scaled. There are a lot of projects that for some corporations need to be branded. There are lots of efforts that exist, that are really good but they only reach a handful of kids; and so the challenge but also the opportunity that we have here with CSLNet and with the California Afterschool Initiative and STEM, is to figure out how do you create regional hubs. How do you marry science resources with after school and out-of-school? How do you help the local YMCA provider get science into their program? How do you take advantage of the intermediaries that exist in so many parts of the state, the science centers that are up and down our state, how do you marry those and bring them together? That's what this effort is all about in California and that we at the Noyce Foundation are supporting in seven other states and hopefully to the 39 states within the Mott Foundation State Afterschool Networks, of which Andee's the head of the Mott Afterschool Network here, and so I would just finish by saying that we are trying to model what we're talking about. We've joined with sister foundations, the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, with Soo Venkatesan and Susan Harvey, and Soo leads the after-school efforts there with Gerald Solomon of the Samueli Foundation. We're going to bring in the folks from the Packard Foundation and then joining in the unique partnership with the California Department of Education leading the way as we go into this effort. So the question is, how can we put aside our initial, our branded efforts within our foundations? Not call it the Noyce Initiative or the Bechtel initiative or the Samueli Initiative but how do we come up with in support as foundations and corporations? How do we brand regional hubs? How do we brand initiatives? We're open to anyone, a corporation that wants to put its brand on the California state STEM Afterschool Initiative because it doesn't matter to us and it doesn't matter to Bechtel, it doesn't matter to Samueli, we just want this to work and so how do we combine our resources and bring them together? That's really the challenge I think for philanthropy in the state to support this kind of work. Chen: Julia did you hear the first panel where there's some discussion around attracting more girls to STEM? What's your take on why more girls aren't interested in STEM and what would it take to attract more girls to these fields? Julia Roche: Is this on? Okay. Well I think that in terms of why young women and girls aren't interested in science is I think especially early on at least for me, in my math class, all we did was learn the problems and learn them in a textbook and then take a test and then move on to the next subject. It wasn't so much looking at, you know, how can the math be applied in the real world and so, you know, luckily for me I was very interested in math when I was younger and I told my mom and she helped me find this great program through this San Diego Science Alliance Program called BE WiSE, which led me, you know, to do out, like, workshops on the weekends that, you know, took me to private businesses and I got to learn about STEM cooperations and not only that but it provided me with young women, these women who are running the programs, they were, you know, 30s, late 20s, it was these young women that were cool, you know. It wasn't some old man with a beard with some physics, you know, no offense, no offense, no offense. But I mean, I think that a lot of it, I think a big deal of it is marketing, you know, we're not selling it to these young girls right now, you know, the women that I see as role models for these young girls wearing these skinny jeans and their Uggs, you know, TV shows, you know, there's no--I don't think there's any real young women role models who are engineers, you know, that girls can look up to and I mean, we were talking earlier about how a mom can be a girl's greatest role model and I think that, you know, just to share a little story. One day I was at school and one of my close friends came up to me and she said, Julia, you are so smart. I can see you being an office manager one day, and you know, now, from her point of view, she meant it as a very high complement because her mother was an office manager but for me, I said, no, I want to be an engineer and you know, that had never crossed her mind so I think that with young girls, you know, on office manager's a great position for some women and I think that, but I think that we just need to kind of broaden their perspective, you know, that you can be more, you can be the first woman in your family, you know, first girl in your family to go to college. You can be the first girl in your family to go into science and I think that just providing these young girls with role models and not just role models but pathways. You know, that after school network, you know. Be Wise, just these pathways where they can explore it instead of boxing them into this hole of, you know, you can only be a nurse or you can only be an office manager. I think it's just kind of a mix of broadening their options as well as providing role models and I think that we'll see an increase in girls in the STEM related fields. Chen: Alright, and I have a feeling you're going to be one of those role models. So Homin, what is the role of a student-led coalition and more student voice, how is that different than having STEM presented to you by adult groups and most of, in the discussion up until now, what is the role of student-led organizations and student voice in really creating a new environment for STEM? Homin Kwark: Well, students know more about what the students want. It's not what parents or teachers or any other type of adults that are trying to make the students want this. The students know what other students want. They know what their peers want and they know what is cool and what's not and that idea is what drives Imagiscience and the idea that the students know exactly where this is heading and what they need to do to get there, that's the big idea that we need to implement with the student coalition that because there's a difference between adults and the students, there's a big difference in their goals and the big difference in how to get there so that's the reason why. Chen: Can you imagine a statewide effort building on what you're doing in Southern California to do more of a student-led state wide coalition around STEM? It'd be very different in tone from what we're talking about here. Kwark: I'm not so sure. Chen: How would you expand what you're doing with Imagiscience statewide? Kwark: Oh well, actually, Imagiscience has 10 local chapters all the way from Orange County and all the way to Alameda County, which is around here, so we are spread out statewide and we're planning on moving nationally and also internationally. We also have people on our executive team who are planning on going out to Korea or Thailand and setting up their own local chapters in those areas so we are expanding very quickly. Chen: Are there examples of students working globally? Or working on global issues as part of the Imagiscience? Kwark: Not yet but there are certain people who are the international relations manager and director who are planning on going out because to really reach out to the people of other nations and really incite science and STEM to these different nations which lack that curiosity and inspiration. Chen: Let's talk a bit of, amongst the entire panel about the chief obstacles to quality STEM in Out-of-School Time. What are the things we need to fix, to improve STEM and out-of-school time? Press-Dawson: As we were developing our whole initiative, one of the challenges that we knew we were up against is the after school, the personnel that work in after school programs are not credentialed teachers and there tends to be a good amount of turnover there because it's a three-hour-a-day job or maybe a four-hour-a-day job but there's not a lot of incentive for people to make it a career. What we are seeing, the advantage of this is often times, we hire people from within the community so they're fabulous role models for the kids. We spend a lot of time training on youth development principles so that they really understand the need to have everything very child-centered and the ideas germinating from the young people that they're serving. The downside is that they're going to go off, they're college schedule may change and they can't stay in that three-hour position so we got to look as we look at developing a professional development system, it's based upon people that are going to turnover, but the good news is, we're helping a lot of our staff and we've seen it have gone on to become credentialed teachers. It's a fabulous jumping off point, so we may lose them to Afterschool but you'll pick them up as part of the regular school days as teachers who have a really good understanding about working with kids, so I'd see that as one of our big challenges. Chen: So Ron? Ottinger: Say, a couple of others, one I mentioned, scaling. How do you take good programming that may exist in one community and scale it, a good example, the executive directors in the room, Linda Kekelis from Techbridge. They're a really wonderful engineering technology program, started in Oakland. They are now creating a model that can be disseminated within California. They also are moving to quite a few other states. So I think of one challenge is, how do you locate good programming and figure out how to scale it? And another one which I think we've learned from Cincinnati and FSG has studied it, common instruments make a difference. Common assessments, how do we know whether we're moving the needle and it's not the same as in school? We're really looking at with increasing interest in engagement in kids, with short surveys that have been validated. We have been figuring out how to really determine whether or not we're reaching kids with science in after school, so I'd say those two. Chen: Great. Onda? Johnson: Also wanted to add that, you know, California invests 550 million dollars in afterschool and in 2006, when the legislation Proposition 49 passed, it changed from being just environments where student were coming after school to be safe to a more of an academic enrichment environment and even in that time, we haven't really encouraged or allowed students the opportunities that we can through that system and the leadership at the school has been one of the major challenges and be able to address that. We also had invested in a leadership success through after school program to try to teach the school leaders how to use these programs to benefit students to increase their academic potential and to engage them in learning in the after school environment. So just with changing the idea about what after school is and what it can offer is one of the major challenges also. Chen: Great. Let's try to get as specific as we can around successes starting with our young people. What have been the most successful STEM experiences for you or may be for some of your peers and how would you like to see those brought to greater scale what has been influential in your own early STEM careers? Kwark: Okay well to, to make stem like widespread and keep the students engaged, the students need to be more involved around STEM and we could see a lot of the success with it with people well with the students and in STEM sorry, in STEM with more of the initiative and more, more curiosity and more imagination in the science or STEM realm and to really make stem successful outside well out-of-school time, we really need the students to really be part of this meeting to as we are and because students are teenagers we don't like being told like told what to do, and we absolutely need the guidance and support of adults but we also want to be in the forefront of this change for STEM. Chen: And amongst the different challenges and programs and competitions that you organized which have been the most successful? Kwark: Well we have a video challenge going on which we've gone several submissions around three and we also have a photo shoot which is something called the Science Is (Fill in the Blank) Campaign, in which we ask students to ask themselves about what science means to them and express it on paper or on their body, and we've gotten responses like science is a mystery, like the question mark here, and science is eye opening, and science is very frustrating and a lot, we have over 3,000 impressions on Facebook with these photos and it's been doing very successful. Chen: And do you think that social media such as Facebook and Twitter could be used more in these competitions, tells us the because this is of course an audience of digital immigrants here I don't know how many of you are tweeting but how what's your view of how social media could be used to engage more young people? Kwark: Well today is the world of technology. Everyone uses technology in some way and for the past few days I've been going around my school asking a few of my friends what they couldn't live without and the very first response that came up to them was Facebook, which is very surprising it wasn't food or shelter or water it was Facebook, and this just shows how much students really depend on social media to interact and to help out others, and with dependency also comes influence though and I've realized that as a high school student myself I have the power to really influence other students, and my friends of friends and even students that I've never even met in my life through social media, and when I founded this high school led nonprofit organization called the Imagiscience we decided to use the social media to really interact and it's been very successful when you use social media to interact with other people. Chen: And Julia in terms of your own again experiences with STEM in Out-of-School Time well what have been the most valuable experiences for you? I've mentioned some of them but if you could describe them more specifically. Julia Roche: Probably the most influential out-of-school experience would have to be my internship that I had at UCSD Scripps Oceanography lab. I'm very fortunate in the school that I go to that in our junior year of high school they allow us to take a month away from school to participate in a week, I mean a four-week long eight-hour day internship which is very exciting and, you know, I found this internship through BE WiSE and basically what I did is I was a lab assistant. I would go in everyday and work with a wonderful woman named Christine Whelan and just in a nutshell we were looking at sea urchin embryo cells and these cells, you know, when they're developing they let in, they flush out chemicals because they're growing in the ocean and these exact--the same cells are in human cancer patients like human cancer cells and so basically what they're finding is that as they're putting chemo into these patients the cells are flushing out the chemo before it works and so we were setting theses cells and, you know, how it can be how these cells can teach us about reducing the use of cancer in cancer patients and still having it be as effective, and I mean working in a lab with PhD and higher, you know, just doctors and these scientists and they're not only were they nice and encouraging but they didn't treat me like dirt being a high school student in there lab who is asking all these questions and, you know, I didn't know how to use any of their equipment at first and it, it just provided me with this connection of people and with them, you know, through them I've meet more people and they've and they're all in the STEM-related field and what I found is these people are willing to talk to me and they're willing to interact with me and I, you know, I kind of have been afraid before because I wasn't sure I want to go into the sciences but I don't know anyone I don't know how to talk to them that, you know, I don't know if they're going to take me seriously and I this internship broadened my perspective and it showed me I can be taken seriously and, you know, they will respect, you know, they'll respect my question and they'll answer me and they won't treat me like some weird teenager as long as I act like an adult around them. So, you know, not only did I learn that I learned some great science things and it showed me that I want to go into engineering and I want to go into biology, and so it was just it was a great experience. Chen: Yeah so coming off with that policy panel what would it take to have a month- long internship for our high school students to do this at scale. But for that or in the out of school time what would it take to make sure that the month of July every student has a chance to have this kind of experience working with our universities and our companies. We do have a few minutes left so I left so I turn it to you for some questions and please take the microphones and identify yourselves. Hope you're all going to attend the student showcase coming up as well, meet many more students who are doing these kinds of things. Carlos Gonzalez: I guess I have to identify myself right? I'm Carlos Gonzalez and I'm with the MESA Program at UC Riverside and you high school students are awesome, you know, and I got to say, I don't I think when you're, when you're in high school and I've got to say this because my experience was that when I was in high school I had opportunities. People gave me opportunities to do research to work, to work at a hospital studying natural killer cells a type of white blood cell. I got these opportunities I couldn't afford the opportunities. I didn't know of any opportunities where I grew up, so we all need to really work hard to bring that back to our kids, to every kid no matter where they're at, and I guess that's at the, at the corner of my the question I have just for the panel it was mentioned that safety was a big thing with Afterschool programs and some communities safety is still a really big thing. How do you--and I guess this is very general question, how do you keep these after-school programs focused on academics and extension well what's happening during the school day but still be relevant programs that exist in communities where safety, where if the kids go home they're not going to eat how do you keep that rigor how do you keep that relevancy in communities where they have those kind of challenges? Johnson: I think that safety definitely is one of the primary goals of after-school programs and I recently, you know, heard some stories that as an adult where it kind of, you know, really shook me in terms of children's experience not having after-school programs available to them and what happens to them in out-of-school time so definitely safety is a big issue. I think what was really brought out by the young people on this panel is that any time you engage students, especially older youth, in areas that are of interest of them that they are leading and not being led and that something sparks an interest, something that they have an interest in and your helping them to support that. You're supporting them in ways that maybe they don't get from home or and other environments. That in itself, it has been the glue that's, that has kept kids coming to these programs participating in these programs, benefiting from these programs. So aside from all the things that are happening, you know, outside of the school environment or wherever these programs exists they've been able to find the safe haven, they've been able to find a place to go to be able to express themselves to learn and to grow, within the same environment. These programs, like Andee said, are on school grounds probably the same school grounds that they are in during the regular day. This is just, and it's in the evening so again the concern about safety is a big issue. We do provide additional funding for some schools to apply for transportation; we say transportation is a part of the grant so that's one of the ways to address that, but again parental involvement is important. Parents are basically fighting to get some of these kids in programs because there are limited spaces. Like I mentioned we provide five hundred and fifty million dollars we currently have over four thousand grantees but is still not enough to meet the need that's out there for these types of programs. So it's definitely engaging them, helping them to be not just receivers of the education but to be participants in their own education and I was truly impressed when I walked through the door this afternoon to register and one of the young people there handed me this pamphlet of his, his student-led organization, it's a nonprofit organization, you know. This has a lot of potential that's out there for students to do things and one other thing I want to mention, I was asked about bridging and I brought up the leadership piece, I think that it's important that in school environments and, you know, some of these programs are in community based organization cause we also have the federal founding I think it's important that, you know, the communication amongst and between the adults in those environment and that means from the janitor to the principal to the district parties, everyone involved in that has a responsibility to ensure that these students are getting programs and activities they're engaging and in moving them to the next level. So the bridging piece is important in all aspects of Afterschool but yeah, this was a very impressive thing. We do have and I didn't mention either, that there's another side to the jump start and that is for the older youth and it's a service learning model. It is engaging about a hundred Afterschool programs that have high school students and it's a way to get them involved in their communities in providing a community service and also learning about a particular issue. Mike Brew is the person in our department that's heading up that part the other side of the jump start piece. So our jump start is a K-12 initiative and so we're really excited about the potential that is there to engage student in to STEM learning. Chen: Andee? Press-Dawson: I want to add a really neat example that your question sparked. The California Afterschool Network every year puts on a summit for high school older youth and we have that coming up at the end of the month, and what we have done every year instead of paying astronomical amounts of money that hotels charge you to rent LCD projectors and everything, we have contracted with the YMCA Afterschool Program of Long Beach and they have a team of high school and middle school kids that are our total technicians for the entire week of the summit. They open up each session each of the small work group the workshops, they completely run all of our technology for the entire week and then we pay them, and they get paid and it's a fabulous model of what they've been able to accomplish and they're taking that now state wide because they know they have a great training program for young people. Chen: Great. Gonzalez: Yeah something very powerful you said because I think every teenager need they need somewhat they need to direct their energy somewhere. Press-Dawson: Yeah. Chen: Yeah. Gonzalez: And they need somewhere to belong they need identity, and they find that in something STEM related its very powerful and also that they're these are student leaders and to foster leadership in young people and is driven by STEM really is something that can be very impactful, I mean they are touching thousands of kids in only a way they can touch so I think we need to not forsake the fact that we can make leaders out of our kids, yeah they're thumbs hurt because that's all they do all day we have to stop looking at them like that and really see the potential in them, and the leadership that they can show all of us. Chen: Great. Linda, did you have one quick question, comment? Linda Katehi: It sounds like you have a much greater demand than you can meet right now in terms of kids in programs. So have you thought about how you might expand the STEM program without your resources? For example, I'm thinking about National Laboratories, Livermore, it's right, you know, in our backyard here, using the resources that they have to connect with students after school summer, summertime is so interesting I hadn't thought about that as really powerful time but if you're going to do something meaningful over a months period of time you need this summer. So have you thought about how, all of you, how to multiply, you know, be a force multiplier I guess is what I would say, to reach more, to reach more students without additional resources on your part but tapping into resources that-- Chen: Linda, that's really the cracks of this whole-- Katehi: --that are out there. Ottinger: --initiative is creating a regional hub so that we can get the science center and the four age and girl scouts and those who really are engage in science as a mission to work with those organizations that want to get science. So that's really the greatest challenge that we have and the greatest opportunity and so you hit right on the head. Chen: Okay one more quick question how's that? John Keller: Sure and actually you somewhat sold my question but I'll just rephrase it slightly. My name is John Keller from--we run a program for pre-service teachers to go to national research laboratories to have some research experiences. We have great we have great examples of those teachers then going back to their schools to their classrooms to become teachers and starting after school programs using the NASA research that they were using with their researchers--with their mentors form the labs. But my question was the same way how do you scale this like we've done this now for two hundred and twenty two teachers pre-service teachers scaling this to all of the communities beyond the national labs what we are examples of how we can actually scale to the entire community of California so that every industry in every, so we have more ownership of communities getting involved and business getting involved? Ottinger: Well you have the right people in the room here because both the UC System and the California State System both have really done a tremendous job of reaching out and working with our community based organizations. A couple of the funders in the state are doing something similar. We've been working with the Cal State System and community colleges and science centers to take teacher pre-service or teacher training candidates in using the after school settings as places for those students to get there teaching experience. So they learn hands on inquiry-based teaching from the GetGo rather than the more traditional science instruction. So, there are structures in the state to do that and a lot of the folks that you could help you are in this room. Keller: Thank you. Chen: Great and my little foot note to that is in order to scale some of these projects we need to know where they are and we need to share that information online and try as a state to map these partnerships so we can begin to look at our assets and then begin to leverage them. It's been a great panel with our state leaders and our student leaders please thank them. Roe: Great.