K-12 Educational Development

Setting a $3.2 million pledge goal was lofty in a year of uncertainty, said Dr. Tacy Ashby, Senior Vice President of K12 Educational Development. Yet despite the roadblocks COVID-19 has presented, GCU and GCE employees reached that ambitious objective. “We’re thrilled to have reached the goal, and it is a reflection of the caring and committed GCU community,” Ashby said.

One in four Arizona classrooms need a teacher, and the pandemic made it worse. GCU has launched an initiative to help certify more teachers, called Canyon L.E.A.P. to Teach, an alternative route to licensure. The program kicked off with hits first cohort in late December and already is having success.

Office of Financial Aid Vice President Chris Arnold sees firsthand how Allocate to Elevate impacts his community. He remembers receiving a letter, written on grade-school, wide-ruled paper, about trip to the Arizona Science Center taken by a student at a school he supports through the initiative. He passes on that passion for the program to his team, which is always the first to reach 90% participation in Allocate to Elevate. JoAnna Langston, Director in the Office of Financial Aid, said the team doesn’t make the program a backburner item. “You make it a priority item,” she said.

Students in grades 7-12 can learn more about science and technology and GCU’s programs in those areas by joining K12 Educational Development’s first MESA (Math Engineering Science Achievement) Virtual STEM Camp. Sessions in the free camp are scheduled for 5-8 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 10 a.m.-noon Saturday.

Just across the freeway from GCU, a little school has grown from 75 students to 875 in just eight years. Empower College Prep has a mission to help students find purpose and do good in the world. Sound familiar? GCU teachers and staff and President Brian Mueller have played a part in mentoring, staffing and forming educational alliances with the charter school.

HSLDA Compassion’s New and Used Curriculum Sale isn’t quite like any other book sale. Instead of focusing on cookbooks or comic books, the organization — the charitable arm of the Home School Legal Defense Association — takes donations of math and history books, lab materials and the like and makes those educational materials available to the home-schooling community. It’s an event sponsored annually by K12 Educational Development, which continues to wrap its arms around the home-schooling community.

There’s a national teacher shortage, a numbers problem GCU is helping address. GCU’s K12 Educational Development hopes its webinar training on teacher certification tests adds up to a solution. Wednesday’s training was the first virtual session on a subject tough to so many across the country trying to pass the certification — math.

Lynette Stant grew up on a Navajo Reservation. She remembers being at her mother’s side to make tortillas, only later realizing that through those experiences she was learning fractions. That came in handy as the Arizona Teacher of the Year and GCU alumna helped teachers this spring find ways to reach students who faced online barriers during emergency remote learning.

The Technology Department continues to help build the nation’s cybersecurity community, thanks to a $100,000 grant awarded by the National Security Agency and National Science Foundation. The GenCyber grant will be used to support a free summer camp on the GCU campus in 2021 designed to help high school educators teach cybersecurity. “We’re in trouble if we’re not creating the next generation,” said Dr. Heather Monthie, Associate Dean of Technology in the College of Science, Engineering and Technology.

With coronavirus-prompted school closures becoming a reality, it also became an inevitability that educators would have to teach in a different way. They would have to turn to online instruction in this new era of distance learning. That’s when GCU’s K12 Educational Development Department started to think of things it could do to support teachers. “We just leaped into action and said let’s put it on a YouTube Channel; we know we can do this,” said Corinne Araza, the department’s Director of STEM Outreach and Program Development. It’s where educators can find webinars and Tip-of-the-Day videos, and where parents can find educational tips, too. The department is also supporting teachers through various social media outlets.