San Juan College receives $1.2M federal grant for broad range of programs

Mike Easterling, Farmington Daily Times
·4 min read

San Juan College officials are excited about receiving a new federal grant that could mean as much as $6 million for the institution over the next five years, but it’s possible that the thing they like most about it is its flexibility.

College officials announced Oct. 16 that the school had been named a recipient of a $1.2 million Environmental Justice Grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management, a program targeted for minority-serving institutions. According to a news release, the grant can be renewed for an additional four years, meaning San Juan College eventually could receive as much as $6 million through the program from the DOE.

That hefty amount certainly came as welcome news to college officials, who are more accustomed to receiving grants of considerably smaller sums. But it is the broad latitude they will have to spend the money that also has them stirred up.

Lorenzo Reyes, the college’s vice president of workforce and economic development, said the school already has identified 12 initiatives it would like to fund with the grant.

Students at Chinle High School in Chinle, Ariz., gather around a San Juan College School of Energy table to watch a demonstration during a recent STEM fair. The college participates in many such events across the region as part of its outreach efforts.
Students at Chinle High School in Chinle, Ariz., gather around a San Juan College School of Energy table to watch a demonstration during a recent STEM fair. The college participates in many such events across the region as part of its outreach efforts.

“We had the luxury of being very creative and choosing things we think are going to have a significant impact in the community,” he said.

Alicia Corbell, the dean of the San Juan College School of Energy, said that list includes the funding of full scholarships — tuition, fees, books, meals, housing — for 15 School of Energy students starting in January. It also includes the cost of day-care services at the school’s Child and Family Development Center for 12 tykes who are the children of School of Energy students.

Other uses for the funding include the sponsorship of 100 students for the summer 2024 Kids College STEM Camp, the purchase of virtual reality headsets for educational programs, the purchase of a membrane technology water purification unit to be integrated into the college’s water technician training program. and the creation of welcome kits for new San Juan College students and graduation kits for soon-to-be graduates.

Alicia Corbell
Alicia Corbell

Corbell said the kits will supply students with some of the essentials they need to begin their college education or to start a career — “Things they need to start off on the right foot,” she said.

The grant money also will be used to launch two children’s summer camps on youth entrepreneurship, and environmental science and engineering. The latter will be targeted for 6- to 11-year-olds, Corbell said, while the former will be designed for older students. Each camp will have a capacity of 50 students.

The camps will serve as an extension of the outreach efforts the college already makes to build and maintain relationships with area schoolchildren, she said.

Reyes said when school officials began putting together a list of initiatives to be funded by the grant, they considered each possibility on the basis of how well it matched up against the goals of the program — how much it contributed to increased social justice, how much it contributed to the region’s economic transformation and how much it would help school officials build a going-to-college culture in San Juan County.

Students listen to a presentation during a breakout session at the San Juan College School of Energy's Energy Week event, an annual gathering designed to introduce San Juan and McKinley county schoolchildren to many of the basics of energy production.
Students listen to a presentation during a breakout session at the San Juan College School of Energy's Energy Week event, an annual gathering designed to introduce San Juan and McKinley county schoolchildren to many of the basics of energy production.

Corbell the building of that college-going mindset is especially important. She noted there a lot of reasons why many local high school graduates don’t feel like college is an option for them — some live in remote areas and have no access to reliable transportation, while others simply have no family history of post-secondary education and grow up believing it is beyond their means.

Lorenzo Reyes
Lorenzo Reyes

Reyes said the college’s own research shows that many San Juan County families have never visited the college campus and have no familiarity with it. Many of the initiatives being funded by the DOE grant are designed to change that, he said, by creating an “economic pathway” that allows students of more-modest means to pursue higher education.

Because of its high minority student population, San Juan College was invited by federal officials to apply for the program, Corbell said. While the college already has been approved for all five years of the program, she said it will have to go through an abbreviated reapplication process each year to report on its progress in order to access the remainder of the funding.

She also said it was likely that some of the initiatives funded by the grant would change from year to year as college officials experiment with different approaches. San Juan College can begin accessing this year’s grant within the next few days, she said, and already has compiled an aggressive to-do list for launching the aforementioned programs.

“We have to hit the ground running,” she said.

Mike Easterling can be reached at 505-564-4610 or measterling@daily-times.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription: http://bit.ly/2I6TU0e.

This article originally appeared on Farmington Daily Times: DOE grant money will be used for scholarships, camps, equipment