Doing its part to promote gender equality, Pleasant Grove High School’s Gifted and Talented Education Club this spring hosted its second annual CaO Girls program.

CaO Girls, pioneered by current GATE president Makena Lue and vice president Jordan Arroyo-Cruz, holds a goal of increasing the number of women pursuing careers involving science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). 

The name CaO Girls refers to the elements calcium and oxygen, whose respective atomic numbers add to 28, the percentage of women that currently make up the STEM workforce.

The program includes dozens of elementary school-aged girls in the Elk Grove Unified School District, and by introducing them to a variety of hands-on STEM-related activities, GATE hopes to inspire the next generation of female scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. 

“I love biology and enjoyed being able to explain it to the girls, and it made me happy to see so many of them find fascination in the subject,” said Arroyo-Cruz. 

The program got off to a slow start, with only about seven girls in attendance during the first year. So GATE leaders extended the program to third and fourth graders (was just fifth and sixth graders), and moved the event from Friday after school to the weekend.

The results were impressive. The most recent event on March 25 was attended by more than 45 students.

“We changed the date of the program to a Saturday instead of Friday after school – this allowed us more time to go in depth into the projects,” said Lue, who explained that the switch not only gave the program the appeal of feeling like a day camp, but it also allowed for the different activities to be more diverse and enriching. 

This year’s attendance was not only a record for CaO Girls, but also for a similar program that CaO replaced after its discontinuation, Snap the Gap. 

“The purpose of Snap the Gap was to decrease the gap for women (in the STEM field),” club adviser Lisa Bjorgum said, making it identical to CaO Girls’ mission. 

GATE Club organized Pleasant Grove’s Snap the Gap sessions for more than 10 years before it was disbanded. It was financed through a government grant, but after research regarding the project concluded at UC Davis, GATE Club no longer had the finances to continue using the same model. However, GATE still looked for ways to begin a similar program, which resulted in CaO Girls. 

“GATE Club has really high achievers for membership, so I bet those were probably the students most likely to enter STEM fields,” Bjorgum said about why the project resonated so much with the club. “It was also nice because GATE Club tends to be majority females, so it just seemed sort of like a natural pairing.” 

But where Snap the Gap was centered around “littleBits Kits,” a collection of circuits and related lessons provided by UC Davis, CaO Girls has been entirely GATE Club’s own creation, which has provided both struggles and benefits for the club. 

“I think that the biggest challenge with the program has been that we made it from scratch so there hasn’t been any sort of guide for us to follow,” Arroyo-Cruz said about developing the program. “It’s been fun to have to be creative and think of activities and ways to run the program, but also definitely one of the more difficult aspects of running CaO Girls.”

After the success of this year, GATE’s officers remain hopeful that the program will continue to expand and have already begun planning for next year. Because of the overwhelming response this year, GATE had to cap the program at 50 girls, so instead of just once a year, GATE wants to hold a session once a quarter. Lue and the GATE Club’s other vice president, Angela Yang, are also entertaining the possibility of a summer session. 

“My favorite part of the program was receiving such heart-warming feedback from the young girls,” Lue said about her motivations behind the program. “Many of them went up to me during the lunch period, asking if we could do this again the next weekend or if they could stay the rest of the day doing more fun activities. The smiles they had plastered on their faces spread to mine.”