SUNY Cortland gets $800K to educate future STEM teachers

CORTLAND — SUNY Cortland on Oct. 30 announced it will receive nearly $800,000 to assist science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and professionals in becoming K-12 educators in “high-need” school districts. 

It’s the second phase of funding the school has earned through the National Science Foundation’s Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program.

The scholarship program is named after the co-inventor of the microchip, the school said.

SUNY Cortland in 2010 received its first phase of Noyce funding, according to the news release.

The school will award 38 scholarships over a five-year period to students pursuing biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and mathematics.

It’ll award 28 scholarships worth $11,500 each to junior or senior undergraduates and 10 scholarships worth $14,000 at the graduate level.

SUNY Cortland will also use the funding, which totals $799,855, to establish a first-year learning community for future STEM educators and to research teaching outcomes after program participants graduate.

“It responds to the critical need for … highly successful math and science teachers, particularly in secondary education or junior high and high school,” says Kerri Freese, coordinator of the Noyce Scholarship Program at SUNY Cortland.

Freese spoke with CNYBJ on Dec. 14. 

Erik Bitterbaum, president of SUNY Cortland, called it “truly wonderful news” for future teachers and for the districts that will eventually benefit from their teaching.

“We need great teachers in STEM disciplines at all grade levels: teachers who enter the classroom with both a depth of knowledge in their content areas and the ability to pass that knowledge on to students,” said Bitterbaum.

The deadline for students to apply for the funding is April 29, 2016, for scholarships applicable to the 2016-17 academic year, according to the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship page on the SUNY Cortland website.

With its initial round of Noyce funding, SUNY Cortland awarded 54 scholarships during the five-year span from 2009 and 2014.

The number of scholarships that SUNY Cortland will award in the second phase “will be slightly less” to devote “proper” funding to study the impact of immersion practices such as specialized classes, field experience, and professional development, according to its release.

Teaching commitment

Noyce Scholars make a post-graduation commitment to teach in districts with high-need schools across New York. 

The term “high need” is an NSF definition, says Freese, which includes a given district’s percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunches and/or its percentage of teachers who are teaching courses outside their certification.

The Binghamton, Cincinnatus, Cortland, Dryden, Homer, Marathon, McGraw, South Seneca, and Tully school districts wrote letters of support for SUNY Cortland’s pursuit of additional funding, she adds. 

The goal is to create a “continuous pipeline of highly trained,” STEM educators to teach in the districts that need them the most.

“This program involves the hard work of a lot of different people from across campus,” Gregory Phelan, professor and chair of the school’s Chemistry Department as well as the principal investigator for the grant, said.

In addition to making a teaching commitment to a school in a high-need area, future recipients will participate in small-group activities such as campus workshops, seminars, and book talks with “highly effective” New York State Master Teachers.

They are instructors that SUNY has recognized “for their dedication to providing the most innovative STEM education,” according to the SUNY website.

Those seminars and book talks seek to provide a “casual, out-of-classroom” environment to discuss best-teaching practices in high-need schools, SUNY Cortland said.