Question? What do you get when you combine a thirty-something, mother of two young girls, career changer with 14 high school teenage boys from the low-income/underserved Northeast Houston community?

Answer: One super ambitious goal to transform students’ lives through STE(A)M summer camps!

As a former engineer and first generation college graduate, I know first-hand how transformational a college education can be to a young kid with limited opportunities. My cause with Pledgecents consists of providing all 125 tenth grade students at KIPP Northeast with a $300 stipend to use toward a STE(A)M summer of learning opportunity (SOL). The SOL could be a summer camp where a future computer scientist would have his/her first introduction to robotics. Another appropriate SOL could be using the stipend toward a summer institute at a local college or university. Each SOL provides low income, potential first generation college students the opportunity to get hands-on experience in their chosen STE(A)M career field.

DID YOU KNOW?

• All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Entwisle & Alexander 1992;Cooper, 1996; Downey et al. 2004).

• Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996).

• About two-thirds of the ninth-grade achievement gap between lower and higher income youth can be explained by unequal
access to summer learning opportunities during the elementary school years. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to
graduate from high school or enter college (Alexander et al. 2007).

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