At some point in our lives, we’re all faced with the question of, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Kids always seem to know exactly what they want to be with answers like, a fireman, a policeman or a ninja. As kids get older, they begin to follow their interest and go down the roads which lead them down their own path.

But how do you know what you want to be if you don’t know all the choices? Dr. Kimberly Childs, professor and Stephen F. Austin interim dean of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, has had a hand in creating the STEM Research and Learning Center for the SFA students.

Kimberly Childs, SFA STEM Research and Learning Center Director

STEM is a new program, just created this semester, which focuses on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. A focus becoming more and more important every day, Childs said.

“The reason it’s important is because as a nation we are falling behind, pitifully, in science and mathematics,” she said. “Every bit of data we’ve been getting for the past decade has pointed to that very fact.”

The education levels are currently hanging at the same levels they were in the 1950s and 1960s.

“Right now as a nation, we are about where we were when Sputnik came around in 1957, which was the race to space,” Childs said. “And Russia won and we lost, and the reason we lost was our science and mathematics were inferior to other nations.”

It was the day Americas lost an important race, but out of the ashes of that defeat grew potential for a brighter future.

“So what happened was in the aftermath of Sputnik is some unprecedented shattering funding came down from agencies like the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Education and what they said was basically, ‘We should take a better look at the way we teach and the way we deliver science and mathematics.’”

And for a while, things started to look up. Improvements were starting to be seen and America was beginning to stand out, but it didn’t take long for things to take another dive.

“After that era, we did start becoming more involved in science and mathematics and as the race continued we began to lose the interest again and lose our students,” she said. “There was a report that came out in 2000 from the commission from the Science Board which said we had yet to capture the attention of our students.”

That observation continued to go unnoticed, according to the following report made in 2005.

“In 2005, the National Academies put together a document called, Rising Above The Gathering Storm, and what is said in that document was in science, technology, engineering and math, we’re not competing and we’re not where we should be in a global competition.”

And even five years after that, the next report said it still wasn’t getting any better.

“In 2010, Rising Above the Gathering Storm revisited the issue and it said 5 years later, we’re in worse shape, and that brings us to the place we are. It has to stop.”

Childs believes the answer to the decline begins with universities across the nation starting a grass roots type effort like the STEM program.

“And we have to start recruiting, retaining and graduating STEM majors,” she said, “and that’s really the bottom line and the soul mission of the STEM Research and Learning Center, to promote the STEM disciplines.”

Recruiting is an important first step for the program, she said, because there are those students out there searching for an answer to what they want to be, without the STEM disciplines among their choices.

“We have students who are interested and highly talented, we have some not talented and interested, not talented and not interested and then we have some students who are talented, but not interested,” she said. “And about 25 percent of students fall into that category, and we in the science and math disciplines are stepping up and saying, ‘We need you; America needs you.”

Reaching these students is only part of the focus, she said. Reaching out to everyone is the only way we can start fixing our problems.

“We’re focused on STEM awareness,” Childs said. “We want our students, our community leaders, our citizens and we want everyone to know, we have a problem and we need your help to fix it.”

The STEM center will have three major functions: one will be research, one will be teaching and learning and the other will be outreach.

“In the outreach mission of the STEM center, we’ll hold seminars and lecture series and events that are open to the community where they can come in and we can talk about things, and that will create a place where people can ask questions, and interact and talk,” she said. “I think as citizens, we all want America to be strong, and perhaps we don’t know what shape we’re in.”

And the current rate will not accomplish those goals, she said.

“One of the statistics I read recently said that of the 23 percent of students who actually claim a major in the STEM disciplines, 40 percent progress to graduation in a six year window,” she said. “With those numbers, we won’t produce enough engineers, enough research scientists, enough mathematicians and enough teachers of those subjects at that rate.”

STEM programs are in demand, she said, but it’s taken some work and of course, the funding needed to get it off the ground.

“Almost a decade ago, I began working with the National Science Foundation and we acquired some very nice funding from the NSF and a high-profile grant program, the Math-Science Partnership Program,” she said. We were fortunate enough to be funded with that and then to get two extensions to do more work. Since then, we’ve accumulated four different grant projects that all began to merge toward the same thing, which is, let’s take a shot at better preparing more for our math and science teachers and providing more in depth professionally development for them.”

She began meeting with other people who were trying to step up similar programs to meet the growing need, and from there knew the next step.

“I said, there is no reason we can’t do that here at SFA,” she said. “We’ve identified the niche, and we know we can do this, and we’re going to go for it.”