BSEI meeting photo courtesy of @chs.bsei on instagram

Walking down the D200s hallway anyone looking over the balcony can see the engineering classes hard at work. Some of those students are hard at work making engineering into an environment that reflects the makeup of our school.

The Buford STEM Equity Initiative (BSEI) is in its fourth year of creating change in the Charlottesville Schools engineering program. The initiative was started by Jude Fairchild in 2021 with the goal of getting more women and minorities involved in engineering. The disparity in the program at CHS is a problem that leaves women who enter the program frustrated and alone. 

This year BSEI is run by three women of color: Sahana Gupta, Lily Dreesen, and Hope George. Sahana Gupta, a senior, has been in engineering since freshman year. Lily Dreesen is a junior who was in engineering classes in middle school but after freshman year she felt alone in her classes. This led to her stepping back from the program until now, despite her continual passion for BSEI. Hope George is a senior who has been in engineering classes her whole high school career but this is her first year leading a change in BSEI. 

Hope sat down with KTR to answer some questions about the future plans of BSEI. 

BSEI’s goal for the year is to “…go to Buford and hopefully get more kids involved in engineering and teach them what engineering is about and hopefully they will be able to transition to high school engineering easier,” she said. 

Hope expressed that the amount of women in the group is lacking. When asked why she thought that, she responded, “They get uninterested or it’s too hard and they do not see a lot of themselves in the program so they drop out.” 

Right now BSEIs biggest obstacle is, “getting more women and people of color in the group.” She says the BSEI president’s plan to address this by starting to recruit more women. 

Hope says she wanted to be a leader within BSEI because “I didn’t see a lot of things happening [last year] and I just saw a bunch of white kids in one area. So I was like how is this Buford Stem Equity? I want to help that equity issue and bring more light to that situation of people of color not being represented in engineering.”

BSEI will become an institution in BACON and the CHS engineering department in the coming years. Despite the challenges, the presidents are very passionate about propelling  BSEI to create more change than any other year. They hope that progress will slowly be shown in the next few years as the next generations of CHS students look down from D200s hallway and see a sea of diversity.