PERMIAN BASIN (KMID/KPEJ) – The University of Texas Permian Basin, the Young Women’s Leadership Academy of Midland, and the Boys and Girls Club of the Permian Basin announced a partnership with the WEX Foundation on a NASA grant of $800,000.

UTPB said this makes the university one of three university sub-awardees on the grant, with the goal of promoting a STEM-based space education, called “New Worlds Await You – Second Generation.”

YWLA and the Boys and Girls Club of the Permian Basin middle school students will be offered a NASA-commissioned curriculum by UTPB students who are studying to become STEM teachers.

The project’s focus is to develop and implement a model to train teachers in NASA space exploration concepts and place them in rural and underserved communities, including West Texas.

“Through this partnership, pre-service teachers, under the guidance of professors, will provide authentic NASA STEM engagement activities to existing after-school programs in regional middle schools. For students in the community, this provides an engaging opportunity to complete hands-on STEM small group work, while exposing students to STEM career options. For our pre-service teachers, current UTPB education students, the project will serve as a tool to provide high impact experiences, thus, strengthening the pool of STEM trained middle school teachers that will serve our community upon graduation and certification,” said Paula Gutierrez, UTPB Biology Lecturer and UTPB NWAY II Principal Investigator.

The WEX Foundation is a San Antonio-based non-profit that is partnered with NASA to inspire the next generation of space investigators, innovators, and leaders. You can learn more about the WEX Foundation on the organization’s website here.

“YWLA is proud to partner with the WEX Foundation and UTPB in a groundbreaking initiative to train teachers in the latest NASA-supported STEM-based learning model for space education and place them in a middle school teaching milieu. Offering this unique, project-based space science exploration curriculum to YWLA middle school students will enhance their mastery of STEM learning and put the possibility of a vast array of aerospace careers on their radar screen. The project is meant to inspire young women, who are vastly underrepresented in STEM fields, to become part of the next generation of our nation’s aerospace innovators, leaders and entrepreneurs. The NWAY II program is a valuable addition to YWLA’s rigorous college preparatory program,” said Laura Doughty, school principal.

“This type of learning is exactly what we aim for in our daily programming. The biggest benefit is that we get to do this alongside UTPB & YWLA, two education powerhouses that already work directly with our club kids and leadership. When we collaborate our efforts are compounded to greater outcomes for kids in the Basin,” said Andra Lancaster Jones, Executive Director of the Boys & Girls Club of the Permian Basin.

“This is our second major NWAY award from NASA, tasking us with STEM-space outreach to bring hands-on space education to rural classrooms across the region. NWAY II aligns significantly with YWLA’s focus on excellence in college preparation, with the aim of placing more young people, happily in this case young women, on the path of aerospace STEM education, in subjects such as robotics, remote sensing, orbital mechanics, astronomy, space medicine, space architecture, and more,” added Sam Ximenes, founder and Board Chair of the WEX Foundation.