1/29/2016: Diane Dietz has the report in the RG here. CoE Dean Randy Kamphaus:

Kamphaus wrote that he shares the alumni’s desire to see SEP continue and flourish, and he pledged to work for a smooth transition.

“The dialogue surrounding this decision has been thought-provoking, respectful, and focused on the future,” he wrote.

It’s true, the Keep SEP Alive Facebook page has been very respectful – in notable contrast to the behavior of Kamphaus, who tried to kill SEP program without any discussion with the parents, students, and teachers whose lives he was messing with, and who then made his Associate Dean take the heat in the press for a week. He did show up to announce he’s giving the program a reprieve, however. Classy.

Meanwhile there’s still no explanation for why he made this decision in the first place, or for how the collaboration with Oak Hill will work in practice, or how it will maintain the high quality of SEP.

1/28/2016: Revenge of the Nerds? Maybe, but so far the Jocks are winning

Rumor down at the faculty club tonight is that the money to restore UO’s Summer Enrichment Program will come from cutting the stipends of the assistant coaches who run Dana Altman’s summer basketball camp, as Diane Dietz of the RG reports that UO leaders are reconsidering the decision to kill its academic Summer Enrichment Program for high school students:

High-level University of Oregon leaders are discussing the fate of the UO’s 35-year-old summer “nerd camp” for gifted teen-agers.

The College of Education announced about a week ago that it would no longer offer the two-week residential Summer Enrichment Program (SEP) that provided intellectual and social enrichment.

The closure sparked a protest from some of the 7,000 or 8,000 alumni of SEP, who are now spread across the United States, including some of them at elite colleges and universities.

A Facebook page titled “Keep SEP Alive” picked up 653 members in one week; members say they are conducting a letter writing campaign, producing videos with personal stories and politicking with officials they hope will help them preserve the program.

Earlier this week, Lauren Lindstrom, UO associate dean of research and outreach at the College of Education, said the university made the decision to close SEP for economic and noneconomic reasons.

The Register-Guard requested financial information that would show the size of the shortfall, but the numbers may not be available until early next week, a UO spokesman said Thursday. …

They closed SEP because of a budget shortfall, but they need time to put together the budget numbers. You don’t have to be a nerdy economist to be skeptical of that claim.

1/24/2016: New Ed School Dean Randy Kamphaus ends UO’s SEP pipeline program

In two days the Facebook group has collected more than 400 members and many, many comments – including more than a few on the latest raises for the football coaches, and noting that today’s RG also had a story about the installation of a giant bronze statue of the athletic department’s mascot in front of Matt Court:

Go Ducks. This seems to be shaping up as just the sort of top-down decision making from the Dean that President Schill assured the Senate would not be done during the budget realignment process.

UO’s Summer Enrichment Program runs 2-week residential camps for about 120 talented and gifted middle and high school students each year. Self-supporting, and with tuition at $1600 and only a few scholarships, these generally aren’t low-SES students, but when the Econ department started SAIL 10 years ago they were our model for a successful local program aimed at showing HS students what college was like, and Director Marjorie DeBuse was very helpful with info on the practical details of how faculty could successfully teach middle school students.

Full disclosure: My god-daughter went to SEP last year, loved it, and is expecting to come back next year. This is the first I’ve heard that it won’t be offered. The supporters have started a facebook page, here, with many moving stories from former students about the program’s effect on their lives.

Diane Dietz’s one-woman fight to fix UO continues with this report on SEP’s closing, and what its parents and alumni are doing to try and save it:

“Parents paid (tuition), but that didn’t cover the complete cost of the program,” she said. “The college had to subsidize to be able to offer it.”

Lindstrom said she didn’t know the size of the shortfall. Marjorie DeBuse, who was the program’s UO director until she retired a year ago, said it long has been self-­supporting.

Parents anteed up as much as $1,595 for the two-week residential program.

“It wasn’t just a financial decision,” Lindstrom said. “We are focused more and more on our research and other programs for college-age students (not those younger).”

The SEP program was created in 1980 out of a father’s grief.

Late UO College of Education professor George Sheperd started the program in the years after his teenage daughter, Kristy Sheperd, committed suicide.

“He felt very strongly about having a program for high-ability, bright young people that would do more than address their academic needs, but would also address their social-­emotional needs,” DeBuse said.

SEP each year has served about 120 academically talented and gifted students in grades six through 10. Participants returned in grades 11 and 12 to serve as junior counselors, a role that included instruction in leadership.

Each camper took a half-dozen classes each year that were created, enriched and taught largely by UO graduate students, some professors and community members.

The young teachers and counselors were an invaluable part of the program, said Cathy Bellavita, a Cottage Grove parent whose son has attended SEP for three years.

Read it all, the rest of the report includes many stories such as this:

A place to get away

Those two weeks were a haven from the judgment and embarrassment wrought by classmates at high school, she said. Marx said she cried when she learned SEP was no more.

“Obviously, I’m not suicidal, but I feel it does something to (help) me, knowing there are people out there that I will be able to connect with. The community will be lacking in that safe place for people,” she said.

Over the decades, as many as 8,000 passed through, Debuse said.

Gifted students need a chance to interact with their intellectual peers, she said, “to be validated for what they know rather than put on hold while other people catch up.

“To not be told ‘we’ll be working on your social skills now because your academics are already really high. You’ll make it on your own.’ ”

Gifted students drop out or check out of high school after the doldrums of days or weeks when they don’t learn anything new, participants said.

But at SEP, the classes are mostly fascinating and clip along at a challenging pace. Some examples: Multivariate Calculus, South Park, Space Law, All Natural Math, Criminal Justice, Quantum Physics.

Jay Steinmetz, a former UO doctoral student in political science, said students he taught at SEP were the best he’d ever had — and he has since been teaching regular university classes at the UO and Willamette University.