Jayla Moore and Michelle Slayton knew they were not in Sweet Home any more when, in the middle of the night, they realized that they needed the “rickety heater” inside their hut, even though outside it was broad daylight.
The Sweet Home High School students, along with classmate Louis Scott, were in Toolik, Alaska, in August of 2024, at a small research station located north of the Arctic Circle, 370 miles north of Fairbanks.
The station, operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks with funding from the National Science Foundation, serves as a year-round facility for a wide variety of scientific research in the Arctic. Its goal is to promote a greater understanding of Arctic science and its global relevance.
For the Sweet Home students, just getting there was an experience.
“It was, like, a 13-hour drive from Fairbanks,” Slayton said, noting that she was particularly impressed by the fact that “there’s a tree line once you get to the Arctic Circle. Trees won’t grow above that.
“It freaked me out a little bit,” she added.
The three, now juniors, were there on a trip provided by Oregon State University’s TRIO/Upward Bound program. The program is one of the three original federal TRIO programs enacted in the 1960s to provide outreach and support to help disadvantaged students get to and succeed in college.
Upward Bound provides ”fundamental support” for high school students whose parents have not attended college, who meet specific income and academic guidelines, and who demonstrate a need for academic support and the potential to be successful in college.
Sweet Home, which has 57 students enrolled, is one of six high schools included in the OSU program. The others are South Albany, Corvallis, McMinnville, Hillsboro and Hood River.
Current Educational Advisor Ann Knight noted that Sweet Home’s is the only one of the OSU schools that has both a math/science and a liberal arts program.
The federally funded program offers academic advising and tutoring, along with field trips and cultural activities, a six-week summer program at OSU that included a two-week stay in the dorms, along with career exploration and assistance with college and financial aid applications, as well as college visits in Oregon, Washington and California. .
Sweet Home students have been to Alaska, some of them to both Toolik and Juneau, and more recently, ZooLights at the Oregon Zoo in December, a visit to Southern Oregon University, a two-day trip to OSU Cascades and Central Oregon Community College in January, and the OSU summer residential program.
The students said they enjoyed the OSU Cascades outing, partly it included a day of learning to ski or snowboard at Mt. Bachelor.
Recent or upcoming events for Sweet Home participants include a scholarship workshop and a leadership conference, advisor Ann Knight said.
She and the students credited former program advisor Mustafa Ismail, who recruited most of them, with getting the program started at Sweet Home. He was replaced by Knight, a former Sweet Home math teacher, who took over in mid-December. She works under OSU staffer Vicky Antunez, one of the OSU managers.
“Mustafa did a great job of building the program up,” said Knight, who retired a year ago. She added that she intends to keep the program going through this year and, if funding continues, into next year. “I just know it’s a good thing for a lot of these kids.
“They haven’t kicked me out yet, so I’m not ready to completely hang it up just yet.”
Slayton and Moore said they learned about the program as freshmen when Ismail visited Tomas Rosa’s English class.
“I grabbed the paper, not really thinking about it, and brought it home to my mom,” Slayton said. “She read it and she convinced me to join.”
Moore said she thought the program “sounded really cool” when Ismail visited and she decided to get involved. Things happened pretty fast after that, she said.
It didn’t take long for things to start happening for them.
“I went and I handed in my application, I got in, and then, probably like the very next week, Mustafa sent me an email,” Moore said. “He goes, ‘Do you want to go to Alaska and OSU?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ and he goes, ‘OK, here you go.’”
Scott said he got into the Toolik trip “literally” at the last minute.
“I had, like, two hours to finish the application, submit it and then 20 minutes after I submitted it, I got an email directly from Vicky saying, ‘Oh, you’re in, by the way. Just come to this spot on this day.”
Lukiss Grover, a senior, along with Scott, spent two weeks in the summer of 2024 at the University of Alaska’s Juneau Icefield Research Program, where Grover said he got to participate in LIDAR scanning, research activities on the Mendenhall Glacier and fly drones, as well as learning about the school and its technological activities.
“The Mendenhall Glacier was beautiful,” he said. “There was a big waterfall too.
“We got an app that did the LIDAR. It’s called Polycam and it lets you take pictures of stuff and makes 3-D model. I still have it.”
The program has clearly produced some clear goals for the students who spoke with a reporter recently.
Slayton said she has always been interested in space, but “I’m kind of realizing it’s more of a hobby than anything and I don’t want to ruin that hobby, so I’m looking more towards mental health now.”
She said if she decides to pursue space, she wants to attend Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Fla. If she goes for a career in mental health, she will likely choose OSU.
Moore said she hopes to attend an in-state college and major in early childhood education with a goal of becoming an elementary school teacher.
Grover said he has always loved cars and had thought about becoming a mechanic but is considering making that a hobby and attending OSU to get into the computer field, in which he is also interested.
Scott said he’s been interested in dinosaurs since he was young and plans to become a paleontologist, either by studying anthropology or zoology at OSU or majoring in paleontology at the University of Oregon.
Another senior, Rally Graham, said he’s interested in a wide range of fields.
“I’ve been changing what I want to do, like, my entire life,” he said.
“I love cats. I’m gonna start a cat cafe, OK? I like to cook, I like to bake. But then I’ve always been super passionate about science. I love animals, so I want to study animals. I love space and I want to study space. I love the weather and I want to study that. I want to study everything.”
He said he realizes he’s going to have to make a choice, so he’s thinking about culinary arts or possibly studying marine biology at OSU so he can go into seal research.
The students said they’ve learned a lot more from their experiences in the program than just what they might want to study in college.
Several, admitting they were introverts before getting involved, said they’ve learned to expand their circle of friendships from one or two individuals in Sweet Home.
Moore related how she helped create a video during last summer’s OSU residential experience intended to give students a chance to speak to government officials about why the program is important, due to concerns that funding will be cut.
She said she discovered that she could ad lib in front of the camera, while others had to write their “speeches.”
“I just started improvising about (potential cuts), saying all my experiences, and it made them cry,” she recalled. “One of my friends came up to me and he’s like, ‘How can you improvise like that on the spot?’ So I was helping my friends try to improvise what they were going to say.”
Scott said he used to be “a big loner guy and didn’t have a lot of friends.”
That was before he went to Juneau two years ago and “kind of splurged a little bit and just bought a bunch of snacks.”
He and a friend realized they had too much food, he said, so “I messaged the entire group chat and was like, ‘Y’all bring your own spoons, bowls, cups and plates and y’all grab some snacks.’”
Since then, he said, clearly relishing his new status, “at a lot of the other schools I am not ‘Louis,’ I am ‘The Louis.’”
Moore chimed in: “To this day there’s, like, brand new recruits and they see Louis and they go, ‘It’s that guy!’” whereupon Scott took over the story: “I’ll be, like, ‘Who are you people?’”
Moore took over again: “Anytime we walked somewhere, people would be, like, ‘Louis Scott, do you have any food?’”
Students from other schools had a name for Scott’s reputation, the others said: “They called it BYOB, bring your own bowl,” Graham said.
Knight said she is looking to build the program from the ground up, recruiting more freshmen this year to participate. The goal is 80 students, she said. She said OSU is hoping to provide more tutoring in the near future, to add to the other benefits for participants.
“I’m focusing largely on ninth- and 10th-graders,” she said, adding that she still has “a few open slots” for older students. “I’d love to get those 11th-grade spots filled as well.”
She said the program changes students’ outlook on life.
“I see excitement about learning and about going to college for these kids, who didn’t think going to college was possible until they learned about what this program can do for them,” she said.
“It’s just so exciting to see the excitement in their faces, seeing dreams becoming reality that they, a few years ago, thought was impossible. It’s just so awesome for them.”