PENINSULA, Ohio — The future is female, and it’s taking shape right here in Northeast Ohio. Thursday morning, the Girl Scouts of Northeast Ohio broke ground on a new STEM Center of Excellence at Camp Ledgewood in Peninsula. Sydney Harbor is one of our area’s 18,000 Girl Scouts.
“This is a big step for Girl Scouts to [be] involved more in the STEM program,” she said.
She’s ready for girls of all ages to have access to technology that will shape their futures.
“It’s taking stuff that we’ve done before but putting it on a grander scale," Harbor said. So expanding it so it’s for everyone and not just for the older ages like some STEM programs and STEM badges are.”
Girl Scouts of Northeast Ohio CEO Jane Christyson told News 5 the STEM Center of Excellence will be a multi-level building with workshops and technology designed to teach girls how to learn from nature to solve today’s technological problems.
“It’s going to have a theme of biomimicry, and so we’re really going to spark the interest of kids in technology by then looking at nature, seeing how nature is the best engineer and nature really knows how to figure out how systems work,” she said.
Christyson described a spectacular building design, complete with a glass butterfly roof boasting wind and solar power sources. Then there’s the whole campus being developed around it where girls can learn about bioretention, bees and bats and work in a rain garden. Christyson described it as “a very immersive experience.”
Fundraising for the project started before the pandemic, then had to take an 18-month pause. Now GSNEO feels like it has enough raised to move ahead with breaking ground. Among the guests Thursday was Ohio Congresswoman Emilia Sykes, who told News 5 that by the 8th grade, girls start getting less encouragement to pursue STEM education.
“It shows in reflection of who is in the workforce,” she said. “We see fewer engineers who are women; we see fewer pilots, we see fewer doctors, we see fewer scientists."
This center is an active effort to boost the number of female workers in STEM fields, which according to Christyson, stands at 28% today,
“If we could get more girls interested in STEM, we would be able to fill the talent pipeline in this area for all those needed jobs that we have today,” she said.
As for Harbour, she said she's more than ready to get on board. She called the new center a college-level of education available to all ages. She can already see the future taking shape.
“Jobs in the future will need girls,” she said. “And STEM is a big part of that.”
The STEM Center for Excellence is scheduled to open in the fall of 2024. It’ll be available to our region’s 18,000 Girl Scouts as well as students from area schools.
Watch live and local news any time:
Download the News 5 Cleveland app now for more stories from us, plus alerts on major news, the latest weather forecast, traffic information and much more. Download now on your Apple device here, and your Android device here.
You can also catch News 5 Cleveland on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Hulu Live and more. We're also on Amazon Alexa devices. Learn more about our streaming options here.
