New wagon, new star to hitch West Virginians

Mt. View Middle School students met a barrage of challenges last Friday morning. It happened in the media center of their school, a multistory building perched on a flattened mountaintop in coal-rich, chronically poor McDowell County, W.Va.

The first challenge came from middle school principal, Roger Smith. When you get out of school, he told them, don’t be satisfied “flipping hamburgers and greasing coal trucks.”

He said he wasn’t satisfied that only 20 percent of them went on to college after graduating from the high school, which is located on the second and third floors of the same building. He expected to raise that percentage to 50.

Smith hadn’t called them in to give them a pep talk, though. He wanted to tell them how he and a team of teachers planned to help them see a future much brighter than the dim one their circumstances offered. To inspire students, school leaders turned to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an organization whose members turn dreams into reality.

Several representatives sat at the table behind Smith. One was Dr. Steve Swanson, an astronaut-trainee; another was Gen. Roy Bridges who piloted the Challenger on a mission in 1985; and a third was Jeff Jezierski, liaison between the White House and NASA. They were there to tell the leaders and students that Mt. View Middle School was one of 50 U. S. schools chosen as a NASA Explorer School. For the next three years, Mt. View will partner with the space agency to give students hands-on, meaningful work in science and math.

The benefits of this collaboration are two-fold. NASA’s outreach mission can rouse students’ imaginations; motivate them to study; broaden their vision of the world, and spark their curiosity about the mysteries of the unknown. NASA benefits, too. Far into the future they need a ready supply of skilled men and women dedicated to the mission “to protect the home planet, explore the universe, and search for life.”

The next challenge came from Jezierski: “Who wants to go to the moon? Who wants to go to Mars?”

A sprinkling of hands went up. That everybody didn’t want to be an astronaut was a good thing. NASA needs low-profile employees, like
Jezierski said something the students could relate to. “I’m from West Virginia.” Knowing that culture, economic problems, and mountains blacked out the stars above their homes, he told them that he, too, couldn’t see the ones above his home when he was growing up on a hilltop in the state’s northern panhandle. The red glaze from the steel mills in the valley below hid them. The fact he couldn’t see the stars didn’t stop him from thinking about them, though, and pursuing a career linked to them. Then came his ultimate challenge: President Bush wants astronauts on the moon by 2020. “That person might be a West Virginian as well,” he said.


The only person in the room to have come close to the moon was Bridges. He had seen the beauty of Earth from 250 miles above. He had felt the deathly pull of gravity before slipping out of its reaches into weightless space.


Like him, Mt. View students could do the same. “I’m from a poor boy from a farm in Georgia,” he said. “My school had two classes per room.” His challenge came out of his space experience: “We will never finish space exploration. We can’t see the edge of the universe, a universe created by God so that we can explore it. There may be life out there waiting for us to find it.”


That urge to explore was the hallmark of astronaut Swanson’s challenge. He grew up in a small town, too, he told the students. “It was like yours.” When there’s not much to do, “you explore the woods,” he said. That childhood pastime can be the first step in a quest to explore the heavens. Finding your way out of the woods prepares you to find your way through space and back home. “A society that stops exploring is a society that stops progressing,” he said. NASA goes to great lengths to show students that our planet is not static.


One way they do this is to let students tell EarthKAM the earthly sites they want to have photographs of. When the International Space Station passes over that terrain, EarthKAM takes the photos, then sends the images to a computer that downloads them onto the Internet. Students can compare how the geography changes from snapshot to snapshot over the course of time. This is just one of a myriad of experiences that the Mt. View Middle School students can participate in.


When the students’ turn to talk came, one boy brought everyone back to Earth when he asked Bridges what his bed on Challenger was like.


“We didn’t need beds. There’s no gravity,” Bridges answered. “We tied ourselves to the wall so that we wouldn’t float all over the place.”


That’s similar to something that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote as a challenge to Americans: “Hitch your wagon to a star,” he said. At Mt. View, the star, of course, is NASA. Tethered to it is the wagon guided by Smith and the NASA team headed by teacher Donald Hairston along with team members Pamela Morris, Annalyn Pike, and Sharon Powell. Piled in behind them are the students, some of whom are along for the adventure, but you have to imagine that some heard their school superintendent Dr. Mark Manchin say, “You aren’t different from them,” referring to the NASA visitors. “You just need to dream and work hard.”