Episode Details

Superintendent Godfrey:
Welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. It's not a typical summer of rest and relaxation for nearly 100 middle school students at Jordan School dDistrict. That's because they are immersed in things like abstract reasoning, problem-solving and computer science. In this episode of the Supercast, we're going to explore something called the Pre-Freshmen Engineering Program or PREP, which is an academically rigorous mathematics-based summer enrichment program. Find out how this program is giving students the opportunity to earn college credit at a very young age. Our guest today is Stacy Pierce, who started the PREP program for students in Jordan School District. Stacy, thanks for joining us.

Stacy:
Glad to be here.

Superintendent Godfrey:
Jordan PREP is the first program, and you are the first person I highlighted with the Board as Superintendent. I get to do a little Superintendent highlight at the beginning of the meeting, and I think it was maybe two weeks before my first meeting. I saw you the culminating event for Jordan PREP last summer, and I bumped the person I already had scheduled. I put you on the agenda just because I was so impressed with your program. So, thanks for talking about it today.

Stacy:
Thank you, I loved it. Thank you for inviting me back.

Superintendent Godfrey:
Give us just an overview of what Jordan PREP is about.

Stacy:
I'd be happy to. Jordan PREP is a program that targets under-represented students. We start recruiting students from the sixth grade. We don't talk to parents, we only talk to students. So the students self-select for this program and they enter in sixth grade and now, believe it or not, they're going to exit in 12th grade. At the time we started recruiting last year, it was a three year program. They invest six weeks of their summer vacation and they choose to study logic, physics, computer science, engineering, statistics, algebraic structures, computer programming, and technical writing. We are in our third year of this program for the Jordan School District. We're the only school district in the Nation with this program. Now, this program has been around 40 years, but in general, it's supported by colleges, not by school districts. So it's a very, very exciting program. We love it. And we're doing it online this year and, believe it or not, we love it online. So that's Jordan PREP.

Superintendent Godfrey:
I'm really interested in hearing how it has transitioned to the online experience. But,  one of the things I thought was particularly impressive about the program as you described, it is the number of guest speakers that you involve to inspire the kids and give them some vision for what they can do with their lives.

Stacy:
I'll tell you, the guest speakers this year have been knocking it out of the ballpark, but every single year I say that. So we try to get a representative population of career speakers. There are a very diverse population of career speakers, men, women of all ethnic diversity, that come and speak to our students. And when we're in-person, we do it every single day. And when we are online, we've done it twice a week. Believe it or not, it's been as effective online as it has been in person. So th