Wooddale, U of M join for grant
Engineering students to benefit
Laneysha Miller is 16. In two years, she hopes to be studying structural engineering at the University of Memphis, a thrill for her and a touchdown for the adults who Friday were cheering her success in several arenas.
Laneysha attends Wooddale High. Until now, Wooddale had never participated in the university’s annual E Day, an open house/competition for prospective engineering students.
Wooddale sported three teams; Laneysha led one. If things go as planned, engineering professors like Stephanie Ivey will be on a first-name basis with her classmates in a matter of weeks.
With a $100,000 federal Garrett A. Morgan grant, named for the AfricanAmerican inventor who designed the first traffic light, Wooddale High and the Herff School of Engineering now
have joint events once a month, plus a roster of university students paid to tutor kids who show an interest in engineering.
“I knew I liked to fix things — make things more efficient — but I didn’t know it was called engineering,” said Laneysha, a junior at Wooddale, the optional city school for aviation careers.
She discovered that last summer in GEE, Girls Experiencing Engineering, the weeklong engineering camp the university offers with the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis. She loved it so much, she figured out a way to come back two more times, lining up rides to and from the university for environmental engineering camp, then the next week, transportation engineering camp.
“Without the program, I would still be undecided,” she said.
For years, people like Sean Ellis, associate director of the university’s Intermodal Freight Transportation Institute, watched kids’ eyes light up in camp, then wondered if he would ever see them again.
“We’d get this great opportunity, then they’d be gone. We may see them again next year, but there was nothing in between to keep the excitement and momentum going. When the grant became available, we said would you like to do something with us?”
Memphis City Schools wrote the grant for the Garrett A. Morgan award and received one of 18 grants the U. S. Department of Transportation will give this year to encourage minority and female students to get degrees in transportationrelated fields.
“We will have eight different interactions,” said Ellis. “We will bring them on campus to meet with our faculty, students and industry leaders. They’ll go on field trips with our students to different freight facilities so they can see the jobs firsthand.”
Instead of having to find rides to the university summer camps, the university will offer an exact replica of its camp schedule at Wooddale, taught by graduate students who are already mentoring Wooddale kids.
“We think this is going to have a great impact,” said Ivey.
The university wants students like Laneysha, known already among engineering faculty as three-peat camper. “She just blossomed in front of us,” Ivey said.
Finding her as a high school underclassman and keeping her interest has been the problem. “We didn’t even know Wooddale had a transportation program,” she said.
It developed it in the 1990s with $ 1 million grant from NASA. Today, the high school has 11 flight simulators, a pathway to earn a private pilot’s license (for free) and industry connections to Pinnacle and FedEx Corp.
But not everyone stays in aviation, said Wooddale instructor Jeff Holmes.
“I think this is going to open their eyes. Transportation and distribution are a big deal here, and now they are going to know about railroads, trucking, barges and boats and have chances to talk to people in all those areas. Then to have the University of Memphis right here for them to go work on their degrees; it’s a wonderful opportunity.”