Welcome

The MissionSTEM Web site is designed to assist NASA grant recipients with their civil rights compliance efforts. The Agency strives to provide a broad scope to its technical assistance in this arena. As with our civil rights technical assistance publications, Title IX and STEM: Promising Practices for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics and Title IX and STEM: A Guide to Conducting Title IX Self-Evaluations, MissionSTEM focuses on university and college STEM education programs; however, the Web site is also inclusive of the great variety of NASA recipients outside of the higher education context. This includes the many museums, planetariums, science centers and space camps nationwide that benefit from NASA dollars. In turn, these recipients provide year-round cultural and informal educational opportunities for their communities and for visitors traveling nationally and internationally.

MissionSTEM seeks to look at the wide range of civil rights related issues that play a part in the daily operations of these very different kinds of entities. This includes the efforts of some of our recipients to ensure meaningful access to their programs and services for limited English proficient (LEP) persons and improved access for individuals with disabilities. We also continue to look at issues of race and gender in STEM education, for example, efforts to recruit and retain women and minority students in STEM, but here too we have expanded our STEM emphasis to include issues relating to non-traditionally aged students in NASA funded educational programs.

We hope that the broad sweep of MissionSTEM will provide something valuable for all of our NASA funding recipients seeking to better ensure equal opportunity and provide greater accessibility to their programs and activities, whether in the educational or the public services arenas.