279 - JROTC STEM Leadership Academy: Youth as Evaluators for Change

Abstract Information: The JROTC STEM Leadership Academy is a six-day residential summer camp that supports today’s workforce needs by engaging JROTC high school Cadets in activities that open pathways to STEM learning and careers. The program, a national scale-up program funded by NDEP supports underserved and underrepresented youth with a combination of STEM learning, engineering design process, and college and industry visit experiences to increase awareness and access to local well-paying, in-demand STEM career opportunities. Managed by the Mobile, AL Public Schools, the program accommodates 150 youth per site increasing the number sites each year over the five-year grant to a total of 12 sites nationally in the fifth year. In 2024 the program operated seven summer academies from Troy, GA to San Diego, CA. The U.S. Army JROTC program provides leadership skills and citizen development to over 300,000 high school students in 1700+ sites across the country (primarily URM populations) with mentorship, academic support, role modeling, and service activities. There is no commitment or expectation that cadets will enlist in the military. Evaluation of the STEM Leadership Academy is conducted by a team of researchers affiliated with the University of Southern Mississippi and engages both quantitative and qualitative data, informing both the program design as well as NDEP leadership. A key evaluation outcome is the understanding of the replication process and how scaling needs to be both efficient yet flexible, addressing the particular contexts of individual sites. The long-term goal is to not only implement the Academy model in new sites, but also to help each district build capacity within the local community to sustain the Academy beyond the grant. Researchers believe that an understanding of the nuances of scaling, local impact, interconnected social factors of motivation, dispositional shifts, and leadership growth among youth required a participatory evaluation design, one based on many of the underlying strands of AEA's central theme of Amplifying and Empowering Voices in Evaluation. The design emphasizes multiple perspectives in the data collection, providing youth the opportunity to evaluate the program and growth in each other’s work and communicate that to the researchers, becoming active participants in the evaluation process. By doing so and empowering youth to reflect upon their own learning, we are building capacity in these organizations to continue evaluation by themselves after the grant funding ends, allowing the local programs to learn and grow as they continue. This locally, participant-focused approach also helps JROTC, an organization traditionally steeped within the tight guardrails of a military "one-size-fits-all" program structure, understand how recognizing such nuances is a path toward scalability and sustainability. Findings so far suggest that 1) building evaluation local capacity in both leadership and youth is key to sustainability; 2) JROTC leadership is increasingly understanding how empowering youth in human development as leadership is as important as developing STEM (engineering) skills, and equally critical to continued program growth and success; 3) every group's perspective (youth, instructors, leadership) knows their input impacts design of next year's academies, valuing their ideas and increasing ownership.