For the first fall in more than three decades, middle school girls won’t be traveling to Centralia College on a Saturday for an introduction to careers in science, technology, engineering, art and math through Expanding Your Horizons (EYH).
Each October since 1993, Expanding Your Horizons has introduced middle school girls in Lewis County and southern Thurston County to fields of study traditionally dominated by men. The program sponsored by the Lewis County chapter of the American Association of University Women and the Centralia College TRIO Talent Search expanded last year to include boys because of federal funding requirements.
“We were playing by those rules that have been handed down as of last year,” said Cathy Cavness, AAUW membership vice president, noting that about 10 of the more than 200 participants last year were male.
But recently, federal grants that helped fund TRIO, the department helping with the event, were no longer offered through the Department of Education, said Corene Jones-Litteer, an AAUW member who helped organize Expanding Your Horizons.
“There is a committee working on a way to resurrect a form of EYH,” she said. “Without the college’s support (woman power and classrooms), it’s going to be a rough restart.”
She noted that Kathleen Vodjansky-Ward, who assisted with the program, recently retired from Centralia College.
“If the grants had been available, her retirement would have been a ripple but not a stop sign,” Jones-Litteer said.
Thousands of young women have participated in Expanding Your Horizons over the decades. When I wrote about the Lewis County AAUW chapter’s centennial anniversary in February 2023, then-58-year member Priscilla Tiller told me she still had the T-shirt she wore during the first Expanding Your Horizons in 1993. So did Jan Leth, another member for more than half a century.
“I do know that EYH is what drew me to LC AAUW,” said Viki Draper, local AAUW chapter president. “I was a middle school teacher and then volunteered in Rochester Middle School. I know what an impact it had on many middle school girls.”
Cavness and Cheryl Vance are chairing a committee exploring options for a placeholder similar to EYH and plan to present ideas to the AAUW chapter within a few months.
A dozen years ago, I drove my daughter to the college, where we watched a demonstration on electricity by a woman from the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry. My daughter then learned about redesigning a house from an architect, heard a physician’s assistant discuss skin care, and discovered the joys of working as a veterinarian. Some girls even stitched a pig’s foot.
The nearly 300 students who attended that year could choose from among 17 hands-on workshops led by women working in the fields. Sessions included radiation, engineering, library research, physical therapy, electronics, aerodynamics, chemistry, firefighting, crime scene investigation, courtroom trials and environmental cleanup.
As children of journalists, both my son and my daughter excelled in writing, but they wanted to earn more money than writers do, so they entered scientific fields.
My mom and dad both worked as nurses after returning to college with six kids between the ages of 3 and 12. It wasn’t easy. We probably were what they describe as latchkey kids because our parents left before we did in the morning and returned home after us. We all did chores and pitched in as a family to make it work. We concocted casseroles, mixing pasta with whatever we found in the cupboards, and gave them personal names — Dad’s Disaster, Mom’s Mess, Julie’s Junk, Sue’s Slop, etc. And I remember quizzing my mother in medical terminology when I was in sixth grade.
At one point, I thought of following them into the medical field. I even remember reading books in Helen Wells’ Cherry Ames series — books about Cherry as a student nurse, an Army nurse, a chief nurse, a flight nurse, etc.
But then I took Mr. Morgan’s seventh-grade biology class where we dissected frogs. As I tentatively cut into the amphibian’s corpse, something moved. I screamed and threw the frog into the air. It hit the ceiling and plopped back onto the counter. So ended my introduction to science.
Guess I didn’t need to worry about my startle reflex.
And math was no better, with geometry and trigonometry driving me nuts.
Even as a parent, when my son showed me his third-grade math homework, I thought it looked fine — until he brought it home marked with a “C.” I told my husband, “This is why they have two-parent households. You’re on!”
So, who would have imagined my son would major in math and computer science at the University of Washington? Or that my daughter would graduate from Washington State University in genetics and cell biology? My son is finishing his master’s degree in computer science in Helsinki, and my daughter works for two histology labs, where she prepares samples for pathologists to examine.
I don’t know whether Expanding Your Horizons inspired her to pursue a degree in the sciences, but I do know it wasn’t her mother.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
