STEM for All: A Student’s Mission to Bridge Educational Gaps
My name is Natalie Winland and I am a senior at Bexley High School. I enjoy being an active member of my community as a volunteer, varsity student athlete, team captain, and will be competing for the title of Miss Ohio Teen USA in May! I also attended the Central Ohio Leadership Academy as a junior and returned this past summer as a keynote speaker. I developed a program in 2022 called Seen and Heard that works to combat educational inequality across the state of Ohio.
A lot of people think of switching schools to be a blessing, a fresh start. You get to be any version of yourself that you’d like, and by now you would think I’d have that down pat. As I walked down the hallway of Maryland Elementary School, I thought about what version of myself I should present to my peers that day.
This would be my third school in the span of three years. What should I wear? How should I talk? Should I wear my cowboy boots like I did in second grade? Should I use the slang I picked up in third? All of these factors that I considered to be crucial to survival in my elementary school brain are now merely afterthoughts as I have come to realize the most critical takeaway from those three years of my life: the importance of educational equality among all students.
Attending three very different schools has made me particularly aware of the vast differences in educational curricula. Whether fundamental academic necessities are overlooked because of a school’s demographics or financial situation, the education received from student to student is undeniably different based on the school district. Not only were my seemingly life-or-death decisions that dictated how I was perceived by my fellow students increasingly different from school to school, but the basis of my education was as well.
I think of my peers, and I wonder if they realize that there are students out there who don’t know how to find the value of a trigonometric function without using a calculator. I know it. I know what it is like to have teachers on strike with my principal as a teacher, but I also know what it is like to have teachers with the resources to support my education in every way possible, and I know that is the issue.
If you venture beyond the Columbus and Ohio River railroad tracks in my hometown you will find an entirely separate reality for Central Ohio students. I decided to focus on creating change in this community rather than staying within the confines of my own through implementing a self-organized and led afterschool Girls in STEM program. I started the program with no more than 15 sign-ups, discouraging but still I persisted and came to the end of the first 5 weeks of my program with a whopping 85 sign-ups. This was a huge accomplishment, but I needed to accommodate by creating a system of cohorts to ensure total participation. I met with one cohort every Wednesday to participate in STEM-based activities and soon received wonderful feedback while watching their passions grow stronger.
I began developing this initiative during my sophomore year of high school and it has since grown tremendously. With great excitement I began to enter the nonprofit space in the spring of 2023, slowly becoming a fundraising-oriented organization that directly offers every resource needed to implement STEM programs within low-income schools. I have even been working to organize a scholarship fund to be awarded to a hardworking minority student with a passion for STEM once a year as well as leadership programming to offer high schoolers the tools they need to lead a program effectively. Through leading my own STEM program while hosting fundraising events, supply drives, and statewide community service programming with my nonprofit, I am bridging the gap between schools of different socioeconomic backgrounds to not only come together, but thrive together.
The change that I have been able to create would not be possible without the team at Leaders of Today. I hope that my story inspires you to get involved with the organization and make an impact on the world today instead of the one tomorrow.
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