Amplify Utah supports and facilitates dynamic journalistic storytelling to celebrate diverse points of view. By partnering with traditional media, we cultivate an environment that encourages stories be shared widely and made easily accessible for our communities to read, hear, watch and engage.
Sandy’s new female speaking club strives to amplify women’s voices
07-06-2025 By Savannah Stacey
These women have entered their public speaking era.
Utah Vipers women’s rugby team takes shot at a national title
05-15-2025 By Elle Crossley
There’s “no choice but to win” for this team, whose members range in age from 18 to 52.
80 Years Later: Student Documentary Revisits Utah's Topaz Camp
05-11-2025 By Jordan Thornblad
"It [is] so important to Utah history that we don’t brush this under the rug."
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After months of work and a delay by the pandemic, Agustin Bautista-Silva presented his mural to a small gathering of students and staff at Salt Lake Community College in April.
“The mural you will see today is a representation of all the times our parents, grandparents, and ancestors wanted us to fly,” Bautista said during the unveiling at the Taylorsville campus. “We all have a similar story.”
Two students pulled back the curtains, revealing a colorful scene depicting a monarch butterfly’s migration from the hands of an individual.
The mural, commissioned by the school’s Latinx Heritage Committee, is emblematic of the journey to the United States that is familiar to many Latinx individuals – either from personal experiences or ancestral stories. The piece, Bautista said, is meant to represent its community on the walls of SLCC.
In 2005, when Bautista was 10 years old, his mother brought him and his younger brother from their home state of Guerrero, Mexico, to Salt Lake City’s Rose Park neighborhood. College was not in his initial plans.
“I always wanted to join the military,” Bautista said.
He submitted two letters of application while he was still in high school. Despite being a DACA recipient, he said he was rejected because he is not a permanent resident.
“At this point, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Bautista said. “I had never put any thought into college or studying for a degree.”
Around the same time, during his senior year of high school, an engineering class and a supportive teacher fueled Bautista’s interest in robotics. The teacher encouraged Bautista to apply for college and paid his application fee.
A few months later, Bautista started classes at SLCC.
“I started meeting more people that looked like me and shared my goals,” Bautista said. “I became more attached to the school.”
The connections he made with the Latinx community at SLCC, he said, helped him to stay focused, especially after returning to college following a year-long break, which he took to work fulltime to pay for tuition.
Bautista, who graduated from SLCC in 2018 and received his bachelor’s from Weber State University in electronics and engineering in April, works for the college in the Orientation and Student Success office. When he saw an announcement from the school’s Latinx Heritage Committee seeking submissions for a new campus mural last year, Bautista figured it was a good opportunity to tap into his sketching hobby.
As of 2020, Hispanic students account for nearly 20% of the school’s student body, according to the SLCC Fact Book. Sendys Estevez, chair of the Latinx Heritage Committee, said the art piece was proposed to reaffirm the experiences of Latinx students on campus through art.
“We wanted to share our story in the college,” Estevez said.
Orientation and Student Success Director Richard Diaz agreed, noting one of the school’s seven values focuses on inclusivity.
“When you walk into the college, you look for something that makes you say, ‘This is a place where I belong’,” he said. “Our community is very diverse, and so we have to be representative of that diversity not just in our student body but also in our spaces.”
Of the many submissions, Bautista’s topical element of migration represented by the butterfly’s journey resonated with the committee.
“The topic of migration hits a lot of us,” Bautista said. “When you talk to more people, you realize we all share a similar perspective.”
For Brenda Santoyo, who works with undocumented students at SLCC’s Dream Center, the mural offers an invitation of inclusion to Latinx students.
“If someone feels like they belong and feels connected to the campus, they’re more likely to persist,” Santoyo explained.
According to the Utah System for Higher Education, 551 undocumented students attend SLCC as of 2020. This is more than double the next closest institution, Utah Valley University, with 244 undocumented students. These figures reflect students who qualify for in-state tuition.
Santoyo emphasized that aside from the mural, initiatives from the Dream Center and the Orientation and Student Success office are available to help Latinx students. For example, the Dream Center hosted its first annual UndocuWeek in April. The week-long event included workshops centered around the lived experiences of undocumented students.
The student success office also offers the Bruin Scholars program, which is designed to aid first-generation, undocumented and non-traditional students by connecting them to resources and dedicated staff.
“If you feel you belong somewhere, it’s more likely you’ll continue and strive for something,” Bautista said.
Ultimately, Bautista hopes the mural can help and inspire future Latinx students in similar ways in which he received aid from peers during his time at SLCC.
“Every single person I’ve met along the way, like Richard, the students I’ve interacted with, had a big impact on me,” Bautista said. “You’re doing it not only for yourself but for other people, too.”
For Bautista, the path one creates will be a model for future generations.
“Even though it might not seem like it, every student that graduates is leaving behind a legacy,” he said. “There is always someone out there looking up to you.”
Sex education is required curriculum in Utah high schools, but students say the classroom isn’t where they are learning the most.
The Utah Board of Education requires eighth through 12th grade health programs to “present a strong abstinence message.” That leaves a lot of questions about how sex works, said Salt Lake Community College student Lauren Hamilton, prompting teens and young adults to do their own research on websites like Instagram and Tumblr, Reddit or from secondhand experiences from friends and peers.
Hamilton, a sociology major who also works in the Gender and Sexuality Student Resource Center, said she first learned about sex from friends and her first boyfriend.
That “isn’t the way you want to learn about sex,” Hamilton said. “It opened the doors for a lot of unhealthy relationship dynamics and unhealthy views on sex.”
Preston Langlois, an SLCC general education major, said he learned the most about sex on Tumblr and the internet generally.
“The lack of talking about sex really contributes to bad behavior around sex, lack of consent, lack of healthy relationships and a lack of understanding,” he said.
Resource center coordinator Peter Moosman described his middle and high school sexual education in Utah as insufficient.
Alexie Zollinger wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Alexie Zollinger wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
It “was not substantial or comprehensive,” he said. “It was like, ‘don’t have sex.’ That was all we got.”
Moosman now teaches a comprehensive adult sexual education workshop at SLCC annually. The workshop, which college instructors can also set up with Moosman for specific classes, covers contraceptive methods, sexually transmitted disease prevention, consent and sex in relation to gender dysphoria.
Whitney Ockey, health promotion manager at the college’s Center for Health and Counseling, said Utah’s abstinence-based education is focused on keeping teens from having sex.
“[The hope is] that students are just going to listen and are not going to have intercourse, hopefully resulting in lower teen pregnancies, STDs and lower rates of abortion,” she said. “The intention is just to teach ‘don’t do it and you won’t have any problems.’ ”
Abstinence-based education has come under fire in recent years by health educators, citing studies and evidence that shows such curriculums are often ineffective in preventing teen pregnancy and STDs.
“I think you can look at that and say it’s not working,” Ockey said.
The Journal of Adolescent Health, for example, found that abstinence-only education programs defined by federal funding requirements can be, “morally problematic, by withholding information and promoting questionable and inaccurate opinions.”
For Ockey, who is also a certified health education specialist , there is value in promoting abstinence and its benefits, but it isn’t the only way.
“I don’t see a lot of harm in teaching the basics of sex education, such as condom use, what [a sexually transmitted illness] is, and that you could have an STI for months or years and not know,” she said. “Right now, no one tells you that.”
While Utah law limits sex education, Ockey is hopeful that over time the program could become more transparent.
“I think it can change, not immediately, and not without a lot of work,” she said. “But once a new generation is in the government, they will be able to enact change.”
Resources on sexual and reproductive health information can be found on SLCC’s website on the Center for Health and Counseling page, under community resources.
Last fall, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a new version of its youth-focused pamphlet, “For the Strength of Youth,” with revised general principles and values for young members to consider when it comes to sexuality purity, clothing, same-gender attraction, and even tattoos.
“The Lord’s standard is for you to honor the sacredness of your body, even when that means being different from the world,” the updated version of the guide reads. “Let this truth and the Spirit be your guide as you make decisions — especially decisions that have lasting effects on your body.”
Some faithful members, however, like married couple Stockton and Brielle Barney, flaunt heavy ink showcasing their love of Utah, their faith, trials and triumphs. While tattoos may be taboo, they say, ink has never been forbidden.
“It’s never been actual doctrine that tattoos are a big no-no,” Stockton Barney said. “It’s always been a cultural thing.”
Their tattoos have strong and personal meanings, and include images they’re happy explaining to anyone curious to ask. A lot of thought goes into every tattoo, given its permanence, Brielle Barney said.
“It was a decision between me and my Heavenly Father,” she said. “Definitely contemplated it a lot just because growing up, it was such a bad connotation behind tattoos, so I took it very seriously.”
Salt Lake Community College journalism student Kristina Martinez joined the couple and their tattoo artist, Raoul “Grey” Manzano, at The Dark Arts studio in Midvale for her documentary short “Inked: Latter-day Saints, Tattoos and Taboos.”
Kristina Martinez reported, filmed and produced this documentary short as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text:
This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Kristina Martinez wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
Women are still few in science and technology fields, and the women working in those fields want young girls to know there is plenty of room for them.
Amy Jenkins, a material science and engineering major at Salt Lake Community College, thinks girls would be less hesitant to pursue STEM studies if teachers and parents normalized the opportunities rather than prefacing them as being difficult or far-reaching.
“There is a misconception that [girls] have to be super nerdy or extra smart,” Jenkins said, comparing studying STEM to driving a car. “Everyone can learn to drive. It’s not a ‘man thing’ or a ‘nerdy girl’ thing to do.”
A recent study by Pew Research shows women continue to be underrepresented in technology fields despite efforts by colleges and businesses to create an inclusive environment. To see more than a small handful of girls in any college science, technology, engineering or math class would be unique at many universities. Educators believe lack of female support may be a contributing factor. Women seem to have their minds made up before they set foot on college campuses, and lack of exposure in early education may be the cause.
A more in-depth look at the study done by Pew shows the STEM gap is closing, with women making up 50% of technical careers in 2019. While this number seems promising, 74% of these women hold a job in health care, while fields such as math, technology and engineering continue to fall short, holding at less than 25% female.
Gabrielle van Brunt, an aerospace engineering major at Utah State University, theorizes it’s predetermined from a young age for girls to hate math and science.
“There’s a lot that can be done in the way teachers present [STEM studies] to keep it from deterring students from going into those fields,” said van Brunt, explaining that the attitude of parents and teachers is key to encouraging young minds.
As the president of Utah State’s chapter for the Society of Women Engineers, Van Brunt and her team visit elementary schools in northern Utah to do engineering experiments, such as creating paper and straw rockets with the kids. Their hope is to pique interest in engineering for all kids and to show young girls they do belong.
According to NASA, 565 people have traveled in space as of March of this year, and 65 of them were women. Young girls watching media coverage of launches are seeing the low number of women, which may be a contributing factor in why girls don’t think they belong.
Studies show that girls – and boys – tend to associate people working in the sciences as men. A 2006 exercise, later published by the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, asked several elementary-aged girls to draw someone working as a mathematician or similar STEM field. The experiment revealed that girls were twice as likely to draw a man in these fields as opposed to a woman.
The question educators are facing is how to encourage girls in these fields from a young age. A study by Columbia University found that men tend to use the left side of the brain (verbal reasoning), while women rely more on the right (visual, verbal and emotional connection).
Some teachers, like Andrea Wood, choose to tackle STEM subjects in a way that taps into the left side.
“I use a lot of music in my teaching,” said Wood, a fourth-grade teacher in the Granite School District. Wood explained that students perform far better in difficult subjects such as math if she introduces concepts to the tune of a catchy song with matching dance moves. Something else that has worked well for Wood is to connect difficult-to-understand STEM subjects to things that are fun, and she does this by using real-life examples.
Jamie Titensor, an engineering teacher at Viewmont High School, believes girls usually have their minds made up about whether they are STEM material before they get to high school. For the girls who do take her class, Titensor does her best to discuss their futures and encourage them to stick with their studies in college – even if they are in the minority in their classes.
Titensor received a bachelor’s in engineering from Brigham Young University and was one of the only women in several of her classes. She hopes she can be a role model for high school girls, showing them a woman can be successful in STEM.
“Girls are just as smart as boys, but we have a lot [of] options these days,” said Titensor.
According to Harvard Business Review, 40% of women who receive engineering degrees eventually quit their jobs. While the most popular reason is to raise their family, there is also toxicity in the workplace. Women said that they often felt treated stereotypically, one example being an assignment as the secretary in group projects while the men did the “real engineering work.”
to remove themselves from a situation where they don’t feel accepted. In a 2020 study done by BYU, researchers learned that women are less likely to speak up if they are outnumbered by their male counterparts.
Sharalyn Beazer, a math teacher at Viewmont High School, said being the only girl didn’t bother her.
“I was an electrical engineer major for a while, and in my calculus class there were two girls, and the rest were guys,” said Beazer.
While the lack of females in her college courses never swayed her, Beazer admits it was the pressure of the culture she was raised in that eventually pushed her to change her major to teaching – a career, she was told, that was more appropriate for a woman.
The BYU study suggests that women are more likely to speak up if there are multiple other women within the group. Beazer uses this idea in her classroom as she pairs students together. By putting more girls together in a group, she hopes they feel supported by one another and empowered to speak up. Today, Beazer said she sees more girls in her math classes, including honors and continuing education classes. Inspiring girls in high school and earlier education, Beazer said, is key to further bridging the gap.
Women role models, engaging classwork, and normalizing subjects previously seen as “nerdy” are a few steps to motivate girls towards STEM. Programs like “Stem like a girl” – a nonprofit organization created to empower elementary-aged girls through virtual workshops – may spark something everlasting within young girls. “When girls know what they’re talking about,” Beazer said. “Society needs to listen.”
Lauren Loock Wilcox wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Lauren Loock Wilcox wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
