Full Circle: WVU Parkersburg Criminal Justice student returns to lead the camp that started it all

Parkersburg, W.Va. (July 3, 2026) — Long before Grace Sprout ever set foot in a college classroom, she was solving crimes from her grandmother’s living room. As a kid, she’d curl up with her grandmother and her Aunt Liz late at night to watch true-crime shows — the kind of programming most families wouldn’t hand to a child, but the kind that Sprout couldn’t get enough of.

Her mother, Kelli Sprout, who works in the nursing department at WVU Parkersburg, saw her interest in criminal justice and signed her up for the college’s summer Teen CSI Academy in 2021.

For the first time, Sprout felt like she was exactly where she was meant to be. The academy let her dig into the subject she loved in a hands-on, educational setting, surrounded by other teenagers who were just as curious as she was. She back the following summer, in 2022, for more.

Sprout began taking classes at WVU Parkersburg as a dual-credit senior before graduating from Parkersburg Catholic High School in 2024, choosing to study under two professors she’d already grown to admire through the academy: Andrew Walker and Amy Strong.

“They’ve both been very good at their jobs and good at leading me towards the profession that I’m more interested in,” Sprout said.

Sprout originally planned to follow her mother into nursing. That changed once she started thinking seriously about who needs an advocate most.

“I want to help that person who feels like they can’t help themselves — those people who have been accused of a crime that maybe they didn’t commit. To be that ear for that person, to help them get their justice,” Sprout said.

In 2024, Sprout returned to the Teen Criminal Justice Academy — by then renamed to reflect the full breadth of the field, not just forensics — to help Walker and Strong run it. It didn’t take long before they had a bigger idea: would Grace want to take it over?

This past June 15-18, she did exactly that, directing the camp for 10 area teenagers. Under her leadership, students processed a mock crime scene, dusted fingerprints, ran powder tests and built a full investigation file — photos, sketches and all. Midweek, Wirt County Prosecuting Attorney Austin Grimmett, a WVU Parkersburg alumnus, came in to hear their findings and walk them through what would happen next in a real case. By the end of the week, two of her campers had decided WVU Parkersburg was where they wanted to be — both are enrolling next semester.

For Sprout, running the camp she once attended as a wide-eyed teenager was its own kind of education.

“I was that little kid who was passionate about something that maybe the rest of their family was not. To be that person that they could tell, ‘I feel so passionate about this, will you listen to me talk about it?’ That was really special — to see myself in those younger kids,” Sprout said.

Sprout earned her Associate of Applied Science in Criminal Justice from WVU Parkersburg in 2025 and is on track to earn her bachelor’s degree in May 2027. She once dreamed of becoming an FBI agent; these days’ she’s keeping her options open across similar government roles with a particular interest in forensic lab work. After graduation, she’s weighing a master’s degree in criminal justice against heading straight into the field.

Sprout has been a kid who fell in love with a subject at her grandmother’s house, a teenager who found her people at a summer camp, a student who found mentors who treated her passion seriously and now a young woman handing that same experience to the next group of curious teenagers.

“I fell in love with the program and I fell in love with the college,” Sprout said.

For Grace Sprout, WVU Parkersburg was never just a place she ended up. It’s the place she grew up — sitting in her mom’s office as a little girl, pretending to work — and that place she came home to, year after year, to become exactly who she wanted to be.

To hear Grace Sprout tell her story in her own words, watch the full video interview on the WVU Parkersburg YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/vdmk5GjFPiw.