Higher education notebook

ASU movie festival features Cash film

Arkansas State University will open its annual Delta Symposium and Delta Flix Film and Media Festival on April 8.

The four-day symposium will kick off at noon April 8 with student films and media presentations in the auditorium of the Carl R. Reng Student Union. This year’s theme is “The South Goes to the Movies,” and the festival will showcase works related to Arkansas’ history and culture, according to a news release.

On that Thursday, documentary filmmaker Beth Harrington will talk about her documentary about singer Johnny Cash and the Carter family, called The Winding Stream — The Carters, The Cashes and The Course of Country Music. Harrington, the keynote speaker, will discuss the film at 2:30 p.m. on April 9 in the student union auditorium.

A complete schedule of the festival is available online at tinyurl.com/ASUfestival.

UALR service unit granted $200,000

A community service unit of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received a $200,000 grant from the state.

MidSOUTH, an arm of UALR’s School of Social Work, received the grant from the state Department of Human Services. It will help MidSOUTH’s clinicians respond to the behavioral needs of children, youths and their families, according to a news release.

The funding began March 2 and will run through June 30.

The unit provides families with education and training in areas of addiction, child welfare, technology, distance learning and organizational development.

Girls STEM event set with HSU grant

Henderson State University will use a grant it recently acquired to host a girls leadership conference, promoting science, technology, engineering and math careers.

The university’s STEM Center received more than $12,000 in grants from the state Department of Higher Education, The Common Sense of the Common Core and the Arkansas STEM Coalition. The Higher Education Department and Common Core group gave a $7,708 grant, allowing for a summer institute to help sixth- through eighth-grade teachers create units for topics that include proportional reasoning and sampling and statistics.

Teachers who attend will receive $350 in equipment for their classrooms and can earn graduate credit, the center’s director, Betty Ramsey, said in a news release.

The rest of the grant — $4,605 — will go to the girls conference, which targets high school sophomores and seniors, along with college freshmen and sophomores. During the conference, students will attend four interactive workshops led by women working in STEM fields, the news release says.

Firm endows ASU scholarship fund

A manufacturing company in northeast Arkansas has committed $200,000 to Arkansas State University for an endowment.

Hytrol Conveyor Company Inc. started the endowment fund, which will be used for scholarships for engineering majors, according to a news release. The Jonesboro-based company, which employs more than 830 workers, designs and manufactures conveyor systems and controls.

The fund will provide a full-tuition scholarship annually to a mechanical or electrical engineering major.

Chris Glenn, the company’s vice president of manufacturing and engineering operations, said the business wanted to invest in its future, along with the university and its students’ futures.

“Over half of our engineers are Arkansas State graduates,” he said.

The scholarship is in line with the university’s goal to increase the number of engineering majors by 25 percent during the next decade to help meet demand from area employers.

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