Myra Griffin
The Houston Sun
At first glance Reagan Flowers does not appear to be the super brainiac Science teacher that decided to start a non- profit STEM program 11 years ago. Founder and President of CSTEM Teacher and Student Support Services, Flowers, is beyond a pretty face and has used her sharp mind and drive for the advancement of under-privilege children to introduce them to a whole new world.
Based in Third Ward Houston, TX on Alabama Street right next to the Cuney Homes, CSTEM is a non- profit organization that is the first Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade integrated STEM learning and enrichment program in the nation. CSTEM highly motivates students to collaboratively work on six projects such as the creation and development of remote controlled robots, geoscience, creative writing, sculpture, film, and photography. The students are required to participate in all areas, providing them with an integrated STEM learning experience.
“CSTEM is an education non- profit focusing on elementary, middle and high school education from a support services vantage point,” said Flowers. “We develop teacher content knowledge and give them the tools and resources to implement what they are teaching to their students and we have them all compete in an international competition at the end of the school year, it’s a part of their accountability piece.”
CSTEM is targeted toward under-served children who are predominately African American and Hispanic children and girls. Those are the populations that are disengaged with STEM.
“We are about helping those who need help but we served every demographic and every ethnicity in our program but we do have over 80% minority participation,” said Flowers.
Flowers is a veteran teacher as she worked 10 years inside of Houston Independent School District (HISD). For five years she taught Science at Jack Yates Senior High School and a served as a Guidance Counselor for a year. After leaving Yates, she went on to become Dean of Students at West Briar Middle School and then the School Improvement Facilitator at Phyllis Wheatley High School.
“C-Stem started when I was working at Yates. I was one of those teachers who thought they were phenomenal and walked on water and my kids were extraordinary,” said Flowers. “I wrote a grant to NASA to build a robot. I got the funding. I didn’t know how complex and competitive it was.”
She led the first robotics program at Yates. Countless hours went into teaching her students about robotics enough for them to go to their first competition where she quickly learned they were in another league.
“ I got to the competition at Reliant and it was like this whole world out there with kids that were so much more advanced than my students, teachers more advanced than I was,” said Flowers.
Flowers zoned in and committed herself to her kid’s commitment to be able to compete. She describes it as an awakening. She knew work needed to be done to bring herself and the students up to speed but she knew it could be done.
“I don’t know if it was the robotics or the kind of learning where kids can problem solve but I realized about my kids that they loved to build and construct, they loved to work with the tools,” said Flowers. “They (students) were really committed they would come in school with me and if I was there seven days they were there seven days, if I was there until 2 in the morning then they were there until 2 in the morning.”
Commitment is a key component in CSTEM and the commitment and excitement about the type of learning happening helped keep Flowers interested in teaching STEM to students although the robotics program wasn’t working out too good at Yates.
“It wasn’t happening in our school, I was raising money and building relationships and it was starting to impact my teaching,” said Flowers. “I was like I’m being paid to be a biology teacher not to run an after school Science club. After burning the candles on both ends CSTEM emerged.”
CSTEM was created as a research project while Reagan was in her doctoral program. She had already left Yates and working as Dean of Students at West Briar Middle School in 2002. The principal allowed Flowers to use 25-30 students to pilot the STEM program and from there she had a successful dissertation and model for the program she felt was needed to help supplement schools.
“For three years I had the opportunity to figure out how to integrate learning, how to connect it where we could build a pipeline with kids that are excited about math and science and can apply it in fun and innovative ways,” said Flowers. “It went so well Shell Oil came to look at it around 2004.”
Flowers passion grew to encourage students to want to pursue a career in STEM. Her position was clear that children couldn’t be what they didn’t know and they couldn’t dream about what they didn’t know. With STEM having so many careers wide open she felt obligated to give the students exposure to what could be.
“ Exposure is key to a child success, you have to expose them to a world outside of their school, outside their community,” said Flowers. “While at Yates we too often run into kids who have never been out of Third Ward.”
One could almost develop a manifesto about her desires to show children more than what is inside of one building. She believes that children have to be pulled out into the world so they can see and build up in a motivation to want to do and want to learn.
“ Its not enough for a teacher to want from their children you have to train them to be self starters and self learners to take control of their learning,” said Flowers.
Those ideals compliment the STEM training and have helped Reagan build a strong organization.
“I try to find a way to ignite them. Every year we find a new curriculum and its created new because the world is changing so fast and we want the kids to have relevant experiences,” said Flowers. “We don’t want them having busy work or just doing something for the sake of saying their doing something. We want them to see that it is real and relevant and they can have a part in solving a world issue.”
Last year they worked on a project with Algae Bloom, which is an alarming amount of Algae populating a habitat that has resulted in destruction in many natural water habitats. The project was a real world issue that showed how their work may have a way to help solve the problem.
“They are looking for solutions whether its with their Geographical Information Service (GIS) projects or robotics project we integrate art as our theme is ‘everyone is an artist and an engineer’ we believe there is a little engineering and artistry in everybody so we connect art to our program and our kids paint murals and integrate the geometry, the science and technology in there,” said Flowers. “They do sculptures, they produced films last year they did Green projects, GIS projects where they can zoom in to any mass of land or water on the planet and research and do projects on it.”
The projects make the kids become very conscious and aware of the environment, conscious about making innovations and ways to solve problems. They work on their projects for 7 or 8 months during the school year and then they come to the George R. Brown Convention Center and compete.
“We are very fortunate as an organization to be the only non-profit that partners with the Shell Eco-Marathon and we hold our competition during their Eco-Marathon Americas. Our kids compete with vehicles that are designed to run on alternative fuel sources and its just an awesome space and it exposes kids to STEM careers beyond anything that they would have the opportunity to know about,” said Flowers. “Most of these kids don’t come from homes where their dad is a geoscientist or their mom is a mechanical/electrical engineer. So they get exposure to these professionals it exposes them to what’s possible if they work hard.”
CSTEM is open to any child who has an interest. CSTEM partner with the schools and allow them to select the students that will participate.
“We really stress that they see the project through from start to finish because its an enormous investment made per school for the kids to have this experience because the teachers don’t have to pay for anything,” said Flowers. “It’s a free program for the students, the schools will pay for the teachers to train.”
CSTEM works with schools in Houston, Fort Bend, Aldine, Alief Independent School Districts as well as Kipp Charter School and Yes Prep Houston and home schools. They are in four states and two countries and two additional states will come on board this year.
“We normally service anywhere between 30-60 schools a year depending on budget it cost to service nearly 10,000 per school in the program. That’s where the fundraising go towards, supporting and funding our schools,” said Flowers.
Once the organization started to grow outside the state all of their services moved to online. Registration is all online and they are trained by industry professionals and the training happens online and all their materials are shipped to them at their schools.
“The schools have to decide they want to be a part of CSTEM. When we started to expand we started to look exclusionary and we would get parents that would say I really want to do this program but the school is not willing so we created the iSTEM Olympiad,” said Flowers. “It was created last year for that problem. If you have a parent or organization,that want to do the program with kids we have the iSTEM Olympiad so they don’t have to be a school. A kid can register for iSTEM as long as they can pay the cost.”
iSTEM is an unpaid program but the CSTEM challenge is a scholarship program but Flowers has found it tough sometimes to work with some schools because they are not use to working as partners and working collaboratively.
The program is flexible as every school has a different set of dynamics. Flowers and staff don’t tell the schools how to implement the STEM program they have the control to do it however they want.
“Some schools have a class dedicated to it, some have it after-school and others only on Saturdays,” said Flowers. “We have Saturday workshops where the teachers and the kids can participate and if they want to meet at their school they can and those Saturdays are a great time for them to all meet at one of their schools.”
CSTEM has many components and the concern of it being overbearing for a child may cross ones mind but Reagan adamantly dispels that and assures the children don’t get overwhelmed. Since the model is set up for the six competition areas, CSTEM calls for math, science, social studies, technology, art and an English teacher and each teacher is asked to lead one of the competition areas. So if it’s worked out the right way they will have six teachers for 20-25 students on each project and most kids just focus on one project but together they make one team.
“Kids are naturally curious and will figure things out and we train the teachers them online and we pace them through it,” said Flowers. “We don’t give them answers but we give them everything they need to put a base model together and if they want to do extra we teach them how to program but if they want it to do extra stuff they have to play with the program to make it do what they want it to do.”
CSTEM is meant to be competitive. As an international program, Flowers intention is to prepare the children to compete internationally.
“For the question why is the school international its because our students are struggling in knowing math and science as they should particularly blacks and Hispanics children and they are the largest un-empowered people in STEM fields,” said Flowers. “They’re not going into STEM fields and a lot of it is because they don’t want to do the work that is necessary to take the chemistry and physics to complete the degrees in those areas so we have to work extra hard to get those kids excited and to want to finish and know what it takes. They have to know they aren’t just competing with their class mates their competing with the kids in Africa, India, Singapore and the world is so flat now that it’s like Singapore is right next door to you now. The internet has just made the world smaller and our kids need to be ready to be global citizens so we work very hard to engage our students to be competitive.”
Annually the students compete in the CSTEM Challenge competition at the George R. Brown Convention Center. They pick the first place winner from the projects presented and only give first place prizes are given.
“The world is a competitive world and I’m preparing them for the real world and I’m not giving them any sense of false hope or accomplishment but they have won because they have shown up because a kid can choose to do nothing but they chose to see their project through from start to finish and come and compete and give it their best. If they don’t come in first maybe they’ll come back again,” said Flowers.
The perks of CSTEM don’t stop with children. The teachers also have an incentive as they are certifying teachers as STEM certified so if they have done all of their teacher training, done all their workshops and competed in the national competition, put in almost 100 hours and submit portfolio they can become a STEM certified teacher. To train six teachers for CSTEM is about $2200 and they have the opportunity to get three hours of graduate level credit through St. Thomas University.
Well over 200 schools since 2002 in HISD has participated in CSTEM. Most of CSTEM partners has been in HISD since it started in HISD. The program is flexible and schools can come in and out.
CSTEM is an organization that is still a small operation as far as staff. Flowers is the one full time staff member and she has six part timers and about 15-20 contractors.
“We have the same needs as a Fortune 500 company but we don’t need it as often as much as a Fortune 500 company,” said Flowers.
CSTEM is integrating more technology into their program and wants to connect more strongly with alumni. They have had an estimated impact of over 50,000 in the past years. They desire to develop more partnerships with companies.
“We’re not always looking for money but sometimes we just need services or staff that will save us money,” said Flowers.
Summer is CSTEM’s retooling time where they write new curriculum for the new year. They get registration ready and identify their trainers for the year.
“Our trainers stay with us for a year, see once the schools pay for the training which is our Teacher Training Institute. They get six free workshops with their students and their teachers. We do one a month. So they train in October and in November they’ll do one Saturday workshop a month and these are facilitated by experts in the field,” said Flowers.
“They inform the curriculum, the outcomes the kids should experience and they coach them through it. They walk them through until April and then they get to come and see kids they’ve never met except for online at the GRB and get to see all the work. We usually have minimum of 3000 kids at the GRB.”
Registration for CSTEM and iSTEM Olympiad is underway now. The registration period will end September 6, 2013 for the CSTEM Challenge and for the iSTEM Olympiad February. This year Flowers will welcome aboard Louisiana and Washington D.C..
CSTEM’s Board of Directors is Earl Cummings, LaQuita Cyprian, Robert L. Satcher M.D., Ph.D., Misty Khan, Syalisa Winata, Ross Peters, Ahmad Shaheed, Morgan Gaskin, Sandra Saldana, Ricky Raven, Joi Beasley, and Reagan Flowers Ph.D.
