FAYETTEVILLE — Johnnieshia Frazier looked out the window of a bus Wednesday morning as it chugged along the streets surrounding the University of Arkansas.
This place is big, she thought. Just like she expected.
Frazier, a senior at Marvell High School in east Arkansas, was struck by another feature of the campus.
“It’s really hilly,” Frazier said, sitting forward in a chair in UA’s student union.
She was one of 41 teenage girls from the Marvell School District who traveled to Northwest Arkansas this week for an event called Dream B.I.G., hosted by the university’s Center for Community Engagement.
The acronym stands for Believing in Girls, a three-day “alternative spring break” initiative of the university’s Volunteer Action Center, an outreach program of the community engagement center.
On Wednesday, the girls spent the morning and early afternoon touring the UA campus (albeit by bus because of persistent rain) and learning about different aspects of college life, from creating class schedules to joining sororities.
UA’s alternative spring break began as an opportunity for its students to volunteer in the community during the week off from classes, said Amanda Finch, program coordinator for the community engagement center.
Last year, a dozen UA students traveled to the Arkansas Delta during spring break to volunteer as youth mentors in Elaine, a town of fewer than 1,000 residents. Community leaders up the road in Marvell were impressed, Finch said, and wanted a program where teenage girls from their school district would travel to the northwest corner of the state during spring break.
They asked the Volunteer Action Center to provide an environment where positive role models would engage with the girls, many of whom live in poverty and aren’t motivated to pursue college, Finch said.
The high school received a grant that paid for the trip’s expenses, including travel, lodging and meals, Finch said.
The idea was to present a “cultural shift” for the girls by exposing them to the arts and higher education in a different geographical area of the state, she said.
In addition to spending time at the university, the group visited Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.
“We just really wanted to take them out of their environment and show them there is more to the world than Marvell, Ark.,” Finch said.
Programs for the girls addressed such things as self-esteem, goal-setting, teamwork and overcoming challenges.
Lauren Wilson, a UA graduate student who helped plan Dream B.I.G., said the vision for the event was to expose the girls to things they may not have seen before, such as a major university campus.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/22/2012