Community Campus earns Career Camps grant

Community Campus has been awarded a $5,310 grant to host Career Camps for Nontraditional Occupations this summer. The goal of the camps is to introduce students to professions that traditionally employ fewer than 25 percent of a gender (ie, welding for females, health sciences for males). 

The Daviess County Public Schools district serves as fiscal agent for Community Campus, which is a partnership of five local school districts – Daviess County, Hancock County, Owensboro Independent, Owensboro Catholic and Whitesville Trinity. Other partners include institutions of higher education (Owensboro Community and Technical College, Western Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky), as well as the Economic Development Corporation and several private sector entities. 

Community Campus blends high school with the first two years of postsecondary education, and is a part of The Partnership for Next Generation Learning, a national initiative that is reshaping education. 

The grant application was coordinated by the Office of Career and Technical Education at the Kentucky Department of Education, and will help fund Gateway to Technology Girls Academy Summer Day Camps. There will be two one-week camps for seventh- and eighth-grade girls. 

The Community Campus STEM Academy (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) was launched in the summer of 2010. There are currently 58 students from six area high schools enrolled in the Project Lead the Way engineering courses – but only five of those students are girls. The summer camps are designed to provide a supportive and exciting opportunity for girls to explore opportunities in the areas of STEM engineering and biomedical academies. 

Activities at the Gateway to Technology camps will include: Building a desert shelter; role-playing a plane-crash survival; creating a spaceship strong and light enough to safely land an “eggstronaut”; build and race a car that runs entirely on solar energy; make a human knot; fire missiles from a catapult made with a mousetrap; build a remote-controlled robot and program it to navigate a maze in a race against the clock. 

Grant applications and information available by contacting Marcia Carpenter, DCPS College and Career Readiness Coordinator, at (270) 852-7000 or marcia.carpenter@daviess.kyschools.us