FCS STEM Recognition - Serving Underrepresented Students

Serving Underrepresented Students

At FCS, we start active recruitment early. After our first year, we saw that our female enrollment was 8% less than our male enrollment. We currently have 46% of our enrollment as females and 54% of our enrollment are males. To ensure that we are recruiting females, students of color and students from low socio-economic backgrounds, we ensure that our scholar recruitment team is diverse. Mrs. Shaver and the students that recruit, don’t just engage students in information receiving but hands-on activities that excite and inspire curiosity. Information is sent out to the elementary schools in early January and applications are received until March. We host open houses, tours, and shadow days (a day where a prospective scholar is allowed to follow around one of our student government members or an 8th grader) for students to determine their interest and dedication in attending. Our student council focuses on recruiting kids that may want or who may be ready for additional academic challenges as well as students who have historically not done well in a traditional setting (either behaviorally or academically). The students at FCS originate from mixed backgrounds, socioeconomic status, gender identification, race, etc. We strive to remove barricades, either real or perceived, to ensure all students are working on a level playing field.
Our students and staff members also volunteer at area science nights to expand the information available about STEM programming and the opportunities available at the high school level as well as post-secondary options. Our Student Success Coach and a few of his robotics team members are currently working on developing a countywide robotics competition. They want to encourage younger students to get involved in the STEM process as well, particularly the designing and programming of LEGO EV3 robots.
We also noticed in our data that our females tended to be involved in more journalism, science olympiad study events, arts-based STEM activities while our males preferred robotics and drones. To ensure more involvement in coding from our females this year, we broadened our arts-based clubs to include coding, manipulation of tools, etc. to support STEM learning in a format fun for females. We also partnered with STEMWest to offer a girls-only STEM club that engages girls in investigations, question-asking, and answer-seeking (GEMS).The administrator has also led a district team to the STEM Education Summit to build a coalition for attracting and retaining a diverse STEM teaching workplace. This work has continued as the team returned supporting district initiatives for recruitment. The work for understanding the diversity in our workforce continues through regional work at the statewide DRIVE Summit.

Evidence: Serving Underrepresented Students