To help two-year colleges prepare competitive proposals to the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program (S-STEM) program the Community College S-STEM Network (CCSN) is offering a virtual, multi-week workshop beginning in October.

Thanks to a current Dear Colleague Letter to the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) community, ATE grantees may also apply for S-STEM funding for up to $1 less than 20 percent of their original ATE grant awards and one of the usual S-STEM funding tracks.

The ATE supplemental awards, however, are for scholarships only. They do not include funding for student services, faculty, staff, or institutional indirect costs of typical S-STEM awards, which begin at $1 million for six years and provide at least $600,000 for scholarships.

S-STEMs are last dollar scholarships that cover up to $15,000 annually of low-income, academically talented STEM majors’ unmet financial needs. Institutions submitting S-STEM proposals determine their costs of attendance, but these expenses can include not only tuition, fees, and books, but living expenses such as housing, transportation, and child care.

“This can be really transformative to people in community college communities,” said David R. Brown, one of the principal investigators of the project entitled Developing and Sharing Research on Low-Income Community College Student Decision-Making and Pathways in STEM.

The other principal investigator is Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers. The project is supported by a pair of collaborative grants, National Science Foundation (NSF) Award 2224671 to the Foundation for California Community Colleges and NSF Award 2224623 to Rutgers University.

Brown and Van Noy are leading the Community College S-STEM Network (CCSN) with a team of researchers who are focusing on how S-STEM students make decisions and what helps them persist to embark on STEM careers.

One of CCSN’s initiatives also assists community college faculty and staff members in navigating the S-STEM proposal process.

CCSN is currently taking applications for its free S-STEM Proposal Preparation Workshop. Selected individuals will meet online weekly for an hour beginning at 3:30 p.m. (Eastern) on Fridays from October 11 to February 28, to help them submit S-STEM grant proposals in advance of the program’s deadline on March 4, 2025.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) annually funds approximately 12,000 new awards, with an average funding duration of three years. Each year some of those new awards are supported by the ATE Program, which focuses on improving and expanding educational programs for skilled workers in high-tech STEM fields. ATE grantees concentrate on a range of fields, including advanced manufacturing, agriculture and environment, bio and chemical, information and security, and micro and nanotechnologies and are based primarily at two-year institutions across the nation. This year we celebrate our new grantees by highlighting four newly funded projects from the 2024 funding cycle. 

Southwestern College Micro-Nano Technology Technical Education Certificate Program

This project addresses the critical national need for a well-prepared workforce in micro- and nano-technology (MNT), a field with growing significance in sectors like electronics, energy security, and biotechnology. MNT involves engineering systems to manipulate matter at micro- and nano-scales, leading to novel technologies with special properties. Despite its importance, opportunities for two-year college students to prepare for MNT careers are limited. The project aims to provide structured educational opportunities for traditional and non-traditional students, particularly from underrepresented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to gain the skills necessary for entry-level technical careers in MNT. Key objectives include creating pathways to high-tech careers, developing a mentoring program, recruiting STEM students, refining the curriculum with industry input, and sharing the project's pedagogical model with other institutions. Partnerships with the University of California at San Diego and the Pennsylvania State University Microelectronics and Nanomanufacturing Consortium for Veterans will offer hands-on training and enhance the curriculum, ensuring graduates are ready to enter the MNT workforce.

The Cyber Fellows Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project at Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is cracking the code for growing a corps of educators to teach cybersecurity.  

Cyber Fellows Principal Investigator Thomas “Tony” W. Brown III explained that the ATE grant awarded by the National Science Foundation in 2021 has been a catalyst for the college to increase its adjunct cybersecurity faculty from six in fall 2021 to 13 in fall 2023. Seven of the 13 instructors were women, and six of the 13 were individuals from racial and ethnic populations historically underrepresented in cybersecurity.

“We were very fortunate to get this grant, and they [the National Science Foundation] essentially gave us everything that we asked for,” Brown said. In addition to leading the Cyber Fellows project, Brown is department chair of Forsyth Tech’s Davis iTec Cybersecurity Center and program coordinator for network management at the North Carolina college.

The ATE grant covers the tuition and related costs for middle school and high school educators to take four cybersecurity courses at Forsyth Tech and a two-week boot camp to prepare for the CompTIA Security+ exam. The grant also covers the fee for the exam, which is the current industry standard for entry-level cybersecurity roles.

Educators who complete the four-course curriculum for Cyber Fellows earn Forsyth Tech’s Information Technology (IT)-Cybersecurity certificate and receive a $250 stipend; those who take the industry exam receive another $250 stipend. The Cyber Fellows also receive travel support to attend one professional conference.

Victoria Ferrell, who was in the first cohort of six Cyber Fellows in 2021, said she was “blown away” by the incentives when she heard Brown’s recruitment pitch to the staff at a GenCyber summer program where she was working. “It kept getting better and better,” she said of the list of benefits.

After more than two decades as a high school career and technical education teacher Ferrell zipped through the required cybersecurity courses at Forsyth Tech and became an adjunct instructor in fall 2022. When the program coordinator position for the department opened, she applied for it and was hired by the college. She is now a co-principal investigator of the Cyber Fellows grant.  

Brown and Ferrell were interviewed via Zoom for this ATE Impacts Blog post. Their article “K-12 Educational Cybersecurity Scaling Program Designed to Meet Industry Needs” in the Journal of Advanced Technological Education (J ATE)  explains the project’s effort to equip educators “to cultivate a future generation of cybersecurity professionals,” bridge the cybersecurity talent gap, and foster diversity.

Brown and Ferrell were among the 11 teams of community college educators who participated in J ATE Connect, which provided coaches to community college educators who had not previously written and submitted manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals.