by Chris Bryant and Elizabeth M. Smith
Children who grow up in the Black Belt and other parts of rural Alabama are not surrounded by many role models who work in science-related professions, says Dr. Martha Powell, professor and chair of biological sciences at UA. As a result, many of these students may not seriously consider a science career.
During each of the past four summers, some 20 high-school students participated in UA’s Rural Science Scholars Program, which encourages small-town students to seek science-related professions and then return to rural areas as science teachers, pharmacists, technicians or health care providers. More than half of this summer’s participants live in the Black Belt. The program is made possible by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Science Education Program grant.
UA’s College of Community Health Sciences has initiated three rural scholars programs as part of a “rural medicine pipeline” to encourage rural students to consider preparing for medical practice in rural Alabama. The programs are the Rural Health Scholars Program, a five-week summer program for eleventh graders founded in 1993; the Rural Medical Scholars program, a pre-med and medical education track established in 1996; and the Minority Rural Health Pipeline Program, which enrolled its first 10 minority students in the summer of 2001.
“We’ve had enough experience now that we’ve watched some of them mature through college, get into medical school and even into residency,” says Dr. John Wheat, professor of community and rural medicine in the College of Community Health Sciences. “If we take a snapshot of the groups as they start in high school and work their way through, in high school they are a very diverse group—both culturally and in geographic distribution across the Black Belt. But if you fast-forward to medical school, that diversity is no longer there.”
In order to change this trend, high-school students are encouraged to take college-level classes and are exposed to many science-related avenues with rural applications. The students also spend time with guest professionals, including physicians, teachers and community leaders.
“We’re losing our minority kids in the college years,” Wheat says. “What we’ve discovered is if we want to keep Black Belt kids and kids from other economically depressed areas at UA in our pipeline, we have to find the level of scholarship support for them that they find at other schools around the state and out of state.”