STEM Grant Honors

San Marcos CISD recently received funding from the Catalyzing Inclusive STEM Experience All Year Round, known as the CISTEME365 grant initiative.

The funding will be used to create a new San Marcos High School STEM Club.

CISTEME365 is a grant initiative by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering in partnership with the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity.

SMCISD received $1,500 from CISTEME365, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The grant will also provide SMHS’s STEM Club with supplies, and will provide students with access to scholarships to attend the University of Illinois STEM Summer Camps.

Wendy Zieger, SMCISD Curriculum Specialist- Secondary Math, said the grant focuses on inclusivity of underrepresented populations in STEM.

“The whole grant was initially written for underprivileged, low income populations, just making STEM more accessible, particularly females, not only females, but really underrepresented populations,” Zieger said. “However, it being a grant, you can’t not invite everyone. You do get all of your students but the meat of the grant is really supposed to be for underrepresented populations.”

Alongside funding for the STEM Club, the grant provided an opportunity for a cohort of SMHS teachers–Catherine Stoughton, Rebecca Kroener, Ricky Daniels, and Zieger–to attend the University of Illinois’s IDEA Electrical & Computer Engineering Camp during July 23-29.

The SMHS team spent the 10-day long camp going through intensive study where they received hands-on engineering experience while working alongside students from across the country.

“The electrical engineering aspect of it was amazing, getting to be on the college campus and see the facilities that they have,” Kroener said. “We wired breadboards and electrical circuits, then soldered them together to create the actual circuits. It was all very, very high level.”

The SMHS team will bring back their experience to lead the newly formed STEM Club. The group said they received high interest from students during Rattler Round Up, and during the first week of school.

“We want to make STEM Club as accessible as possible,” said Stoughton. “A lot of kids are actually interested. You don’t have to be on a computer and coding for engineering. It doesn’t just have to be electrical engineering. There’s all kinds of stuff.”

Through the grant, the SMHS team will also be responsible for chronicling their STEM Club experience through an action research project.

“It’s just documenting our journey: What worked? What didn’t work? What were our findings?,” Zieger said. “Everyone’s reaction research is going to look different. It could be different experiences. It really is up to us how we want to do it.”

CISTEME365 builds upon the 2019-2023 Increase Diversity, Equity, & Access Team foundations to increase efforts to encourage women, Black, and Latina/o youth, low-income, or otherwise underrepresented populations to stick with and excel in math, science and engineering.