YSP Steering Committee Meeting Minutes
November 10, 2010
Funding and Budget
Pfizer – Nothing to report
Leon Lowenstein –
1. We have formed a kit committee. They will plan a meeting and let everyone know when they will meet. 2. Fam Med Program – Third session of Fam Med Program was Oct. 23rd. The fourth and final session will be Nov. 20th from 1:30 -3:30 pm at the Science Center. 4. Women in Science Day – complete and another success. We are tallying the surveys and working on summarizing the event. 5. An annual report to LLF will be due in December.
Endowment/Promotion/Publicity-
Jen met with Development contact. We will work on the endowment letter and yearly newsletter to go out to our mailing list to solicit donations for the YSP endowment.
Alumni Association –
The alumni association once again awarded YSP funding for the 10-11 academic year. Thanks to Reece for representing YSP.
HHMI –
Nothing to report
Women In Science Day–
On November 3rd in collaboration with AWIS, we hosted approximately 120 girls for Women in Science Day. Danforth campus hosted girls from Beaumont, Metro, and McKinley High School. Med campus hosted Gateway, Career Academy, and Central VPA. Once again another successful event. We are tallying surveys and summarizing the event to report to the Gephardt Institute (they provided $250 of funding) and for LLF when our annual report is submitted.
Website– Albert has made some updates to the YSP website. He changed the colors (we are discussing using a different color scheme. As of now it is in WU colors). He also added pictures to several of the pages that change each time the page is brought up. The new site design is best viewed in Firefox and Safari. Because of programming issues with Internet Explorer, the changes don’t appear on IE. The information is the same, but no photos and the home page is not showing correctly. We have put a sentence on the site in the IE browser that states for optimal viewing, they should use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
Alpha Omega Investigators–Erica Siebrasse will be working on the development and planning of the Alpha/Omega investigators program. This is a program proposed in the HHMI grant and we will combine the program with Erica’s experience from the summer lab course she began and coordinated as an undergrad. This will be a 2-day summer event with middle school students participating in several lab course experiments. The course will be held July 14-16. If you are interested in helping during the course or with the planning of the event, please let Jen or Erica know.
Teacher Kit Committee –
We have formed a teacher kit committee to brainstorm and develop several teacher kits for this academic year. They are meeting on Monday, November 15 at 5:30 pm in 214 FLTC.
NEW – Tutoring program – Thank you to everyone that completed Varun’s survey. He and Kate met and he is making updates to the program and will have more information for those interested in the program. This will be launched in January 2011 and will be a tutoring experience for high school students. Varun is also looking for someone to help him in the process next semester. If you are interested, please let Jen know.
UrbanFUTURE – For those that may be interested in tutoring younger students (middle and elementary) - Jacob Blanton attended our meeting. He is from UrbanFUTURE. This is a mentoring and tutoring program that operates within struggling St. Louis Public Schools. They focus on students from 4th to 8th grade with the intention of following students from elementary school through middle school. Their philosophy centers on their belief that families, communities, and schools must work together in order for students to obtain academic success. In this model, the community is represented by amazing volunteers who give an hour of their time each week to meet with our students and work with them on the basic skills that they need in order to be successful in math and communication arts. As our organization expands into more schools, their demand for volunteers increases as well. Right now, they are in the midst of a volunteer recruitment campaign where they hope to fill their tutor/mentor need in our four new schools. If you have any questions or interested in volunteering, pleasecontact Jacob at or at 484-686-4270. You can also contact their main office at 314-776-3434 or go to for more information about our organization. We will also work with them to provide teaching team outings and teacher kits.
Nano Medical School – December 7 from 6:30-8:30 pm in Connor Auditorium.
The Fall Nano Medical School will feature Dr. Monique Williams speaking on the topic of Alzheimers. We will need volunteers to attend for the dinner portion and talk (if they want to stay).
Community Advisory Board–December 7 from 3:30 – 5pm
Each semester the YSP advisory board (made up of faculty, teachers, students, WU staff, St. L community) meets to discuss the semester and solicit feedback from the board.
20 Year Anniversary Celebration – Date for the 20 year anniversary celebration is May 6, 2011, so mark your calendars. We are working on securing a speaker and then we will begin the additional planning and will need lots of volunteers to help with many aspects of this large event.
Publication andAssessment – Kate, Brit, and Devi continue to work on the new publication. They will meet with Dr. W and Jen on Nov 17th to discuss more about it. The Holts have also provided a very nice long summary of all the YSP information they have collected over the past 3 years. This summary will be helpful to our publication and for any other articles, we may choose to pursue.
Program Updates:
SF: Applications are now available online. Jen will be going to visit schools this month.
TRP: TRP apps for teachers and mentors have been updated and are available online.
TT: 25 teaching team demos so far this year.
Fieldtrips:
CorJesu – November – Nov 16
Calc Inst of IL – 2nd group – Dec 7
Community Partnerships: Working on teacher kits
Notes/Miscellaneous–We will have a YSP Volunteer Appreciation lunch in December. Date and time is TBA!
Next Meeting: Next meeting Wednesday, Dec 1 from 12-1.