By Verna Slate, Williamson County Bureau
CARTERVILLE, Ill. — A Carterville High School student is the first to take part in a new summer pilot research program built between Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the Garwin Family Foundation, according to the Southern Illinoisan.
The program gives area high schoolers a foot in the door of university-level research — the kind of opportunity that, for decades, meant leaving southern Illinois and rarely coming back. Carterville, home to John A. Logan College and a fast-growing residential base, has increasingly become a feeder for that kind of ambition rather than a place kids leave behind.
Few details on the student's identity or the scope of the research were included in early reporting, but the pilot marks a new kind of partnership for a region long defined by what it lost — coal jobs, mine payrolls, whole towns' worth of work — and now measured, in small part, by what it's building instead. The American Times Press will follow the program as more Williamson County students come through it.
— Compiled from reporting by the Southern Illinoisan.
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