Urban TEC drives an 'HBCU Girl's' rebel mission
A Faxon Elementary School student in the LINC after-school program in Kansas City Public Schools focuses on his 3-D pen work in an Urban TEC class.
Ina P. Montgomery, the “serial entrepreneur,” doesn’t forget her long-ago high-school self.
She’s still the tempest who — after a white suburban Kansas City guidance counselor told her she probably wasn’t college material — declared with great Black pride that she’d storm the world in business for herself right out of high school.
Ina P. Montgomery, the #HBCUGirl, watches over students at work in an Urban TEC class.
“But God takes you through stuff,” she says now, some 40 years later. “And everything comes full circle.”
It’s as if all the roads she could have taken — and the many roads she did — were bound to lead her here.
She’s the executive director of Urban Technology Empowered Communities — Urban TEC — a non-profit taking dazzling programs of science, technology, engineering, arts and math into after-school classrooms and community spaces where most of the children are Black like her.
She delivers STEAM Labs in a series of five sessions, building the anticipation in children who wonder what she’ll bring next in her canvas wagon of fascinating games and projects.
As the pouch she sometimes wears over her shoulder says, she is an #HBCUGirl. She’s a grad of one of the Historic Black Colleges and Universities — South Carolina State — with a master’s degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Her degrees are in computer science and instructional technology — a rare career track for a young Black woman in the 1980s. The children she greets in classrooms today have no idea of the paths that brought her to them, nor do most of the adults. But she’s where she belongs, say the many youth program managers who summon her.
“She is strong in love and she commands the room,” said Yolanda Robinson, the Caring Communities Coordinator at the Local Investment Commission’s after-school program at Kansas City’s Faxon Elementary School.
“The kids respect this,” she said. Many times, when children hear their names called over a walkie talkie that a parent has arrived to take them home, “the kids don’t want to leave,” Robinson said. “They want to stay because they’re learning something cool, something fun.”
There’s more to it than that. It goes to the voice in Montgomery’s head that kept prodding her during her varied and winding course of entrepreneurial ventures.
Montgomery guides students in a circuitry project in the LINC after-school program at Ingels Elementary in the Hickman Mills School District.
Watch how the children in Urban TEC projects work together, Robinson said. They might be lighting up musical bananas with electrical conduction, snapping together circuit boards or drawing in three dimensions, but “they’re learning to get along,” Robinson said. “They’re working together to solve problems.”
Many of them live in some of Kansas City’s most violent ZIP codes. The consequences of the badly resolved anger of adults weigh on many of their futures, and statistics continue to show students of color being underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math.
Black students make up 12% of the national college enrollment but only 7% of the STEM-related graduates and only 5% of the population in architecture or engineering careers, according to trends reported by the Pew Research Center.
Just as troubling to Montgomery are the gaps in digital literacy and access that prevent children and their families from pursuing or even imagining daring achievements, whatever they might be.
It’s why she was one of the founders of Kansas City’s Coalition for Digital Inclusion and a current steering committee member. It’s why she targets underserved neighborhoods and children.
It’s why she made space for her base of operations in Kansas City’s Central High School for a career center, and a digital literacy center that she opens for parent workforce development classes on Saturdays, and a corner reading lounge with books on high-achieving and revolutionary Black Americans.
Collaboration, critical thinking, communication and creativity with 21st Century skills — those are the “4-C’s” of Urban TEC’s mission. And Montgomery continually blends her lessons with the inventions and contributions of Black men and women.
This is where she finds herself today. She gestures to the room and its varied displays.
“I believe in the intersection of technology and Black history.”
‘Girl, you’ve got to commit’
This is not necessarily what she imagined when she bolted out of high school in the early 1980s with her diploma and a defiant disposition.
She was one of 35 Black students in her high school senior class of 481 students — a good student, on the newspaper staff, and the track team. “You’d see me all through my high school yearbook,” she said.
She graduated and left behind the English teacher who thought her disruptive. Turned away from the counselor who said that something other than a four-year university would suit her better. Undaunted, she aimed herself at a plan with no shape other than she was going to make her own way.
“I was going to work for myself,” Montgomery said.
That fall, colleges were just about to get under way when her father — a career Navy man — discovered to his dismay his daughter was not going to any one of them. At his insistence she enrolled at Avila University at the last minute.
The next year she took off for South Carolina State and the Historic Black College and University experience — “and it was great,” she said. She earned a degree in computer science, and later completed her master’s at UVa.
Black history and personal inspiration fill the shelves and wall spaces at Urban TEC’s Central High School office.
Her career path started as a sales representative with Informix Software in Lenexa. After getting her master’s degree she worked for the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm in Washington, D.C., developing computer-based training projects for government agencies. Then she went into education as the technology director for Edison Schools, first in D.C., then back in Kansas City at Westport-Edison High School.
But the entrepreneurial drive never quieted. In the 2000s she took an adjunct professorship to teach computer science at Metropolitan Community Colleges in Kansas City, but was bent at the same time on striking out on her own course, starting a series of for-profit and non-profit ventures.
Along the way her social-justice spirit — flamed by her experience with the world’s low expectations for Black students — began to burn.
Her networking had led her to many community groups like the Black Agenda and school organizations where she heard over and over the frustrations of inequitable opportunities for Black children.
“There I was,” she said. “I’m sitting on all this knowledge. I knew I needed to be doing more.”
That voice inside her came louder than ever, she said. “Girl, you’ve got to commit!”
And how.
Several views of the Urban TEC space at Central High School.
The breadth of her investment stacks in the overloaded shelves of games and kits she accumulates to go along with a 3–D printer, banks of computers, coding programs and drones. Squishy Circuits, Ozobots, Elephant Toothpaste, Makey Makey, Snap Circuits, Balance Beans . . .
She scrambles relentlessly after grants and donors to expand and keep her offerings fresh and engaging in step with the rising expectations of the children in her classes.
Her mission reaches to teenagers as well, by gathering high school students and helping them make connections and gain experiences through partnerships with engineering and design firms. She created the Sisters in STEAM program for girls and the Brothers in Technology program for boys.
The Kansas City Public Schools named Montgomery a KCPS “Community Champion” in 2019 for her work in their schools.
“She had her tentacles in the STEM ecosystem in ways we did not,” said Derald Davis, the KCPS assistant superintendent of equity, inclusion and innovation. “And she was intentional about bringing opportunities to kids who needed it most.”
Sometimes she would tell Davis about events industry was putting on for kids, then she came with her own ideas, Davis said. Her BIT Conference — Brothers in STEM — was one remarkable example.
“I went from break-out room to break-out room,” Davis said, “and she had professional music producers and engineers . . . and they were all men of color.”
Students were enthralled in the work, he said, and seeing STEM careers as “possible, even probable, for them as well.”
Courtney Adams, the KCPS family and community engagement coordinator, has watched Montgomery working with teenagers.
More than anyone or organization Adams knows, Montgomery “really understands the size of the digital gap between the urban community, black and brown students, and girls and everybody else,” she said.
Ingels Elementary students take on circuitry during Urban TEC.
“She’s making sure the underserved and underexposed students and communities have the same opportunities as everyone else — the same experiences that bring comfort and the ability to try these things.”
LINC, with more than 40 after-school programs in elementary schools in the Kansas City, Hickman Mills, Center and Grandview school districts, has opened its doors for Urban TEC to reach hundreds of the children she’s driven to inspire.
She sets up at special events as well, like LINC’s youth chess tournament — an ideal mix with chess players and their siblings between matches getting a taste of Montgomery’s inventive games.
It turns the weekend events into a carnival of “critical thinking,” said LINC Caring Communities Administrator Sean Akridge, with more children “getting exposure and access . . . exploring their minds, getting to think deeper.”
Now it really gets good
It’s time to hang on. This enterprise and the confidence of the generation coming in behind Montgomery are ready to “catapult,” she says.
She hopes for something of a golden age, with youth like she was 40 years ago growing into adulthood today with mentors that Montgomery didn’t have. She packs more ideas into her work for these children like she’s making up for lost time. She wants Urban TEC to fly with them.
“All my ideas and the vision I had might be 20 years delayed,” Montgomery says, looking back at the wide-ranging course of her entrepreneurial years. “But I’m here.”
She’s preparing for Urban TEC’s next level, which she calls the NextGen Club. The expanding program will feature work with drones, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and eSports. She wants no limits on what she can bring to urban schools and communities.
Today’s youth deserve nothing less. In fact, she says, many are demanding nothing less.
“The new generation of technology service companies are coming up, they’re out there and they’re being innovative in providing the opportunities that our community needs,” Montgomery said.
“They’re changing the game,” she said, “and I like it.”
By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer