It’s 10 a.m. at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and already the first school bus full of children is pulling up outside.
Inside, teachers from seven states are busy reviewing high-technology media equipment. In another hour, 110 middle school pupils will arrive for a day of experiments and fun.
“There’s a lot going on here,” said Marge Bardeen, program manager of the Fermilab education office in Batavia. Last year, the program served 40,000 students and 10,000 teachers, Bardeen said, “and it’s been going up steadily.”
While Fermilab lays off employees because of tight funds, spending on its educational program has been increasing substantially.
The program has become a thriving island of plenty in the stormy sea of federal budget cuts that has given a whole generation of physicists the job jitters.
At a time when deficit-weary taxpayers are questioning the need for esoteric science projects funded with tax dollars, Congress has terminated major research endeavors such as the superconducting supercollider in Texas and the Integral Fast Reactor at Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont. The tight purse strings forced Fermilab to lay off 25 employees this month.
Yet spending for Fermilab’s education program has nearly doubled in the last few years, from about $800,000 in 1991 to almost $1.5 million in 1994.
And the funds are expected to keep on flowing.
“We have been recommended for increases” for the coming year, Bardeen said. The exact amount of the pending increase has not been determined, she said.
This contrasts sharply with the overall financial picture at Fermilab. The total current budget there, excluding major projects, is about $200 million-a level that has remained constant or declined slightly since 1989, according to Bruce Chrisman, associate director.
What’s going on?
The disparate spending patterns reflect a new priority as America gears up for the post-Cold War battlefield in the global marketplace, Bardeen said. It’s an arms race based on brain power, an effort to beef up the nation’s economic arsenal by producing more scientists.
The U.S. Energy Department, which funds Fermilab and other major scientific endeavors, is “very interested in economic development, which depends on a technically literate workforce,” Bardeen said.
“Blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and women are underrepresented in the sciences,” Bardeen said. “There’s a realization that it’s too late to wait until someone is in college to interest them in science. . . . That’s one of the reasons they’re interested in increasing the funding in this area.”
Fermilab offers students hands-on opportunities in two general areas: physics and biology.
The biology programs make use of Fermilab’s vast open spaces, since most of the facility is underground.
Since 1974, Fermilab has been cultivating a reconstructed prairie that takes up about 600 acres. On a separate pasture, the lab maintains about 100 bison.
Students have a chance to participate in science by tracking the variety of prairie plants, analyzing soil and measuring water quality, among other projects, said David Abler, program leader.
On the physics side, students have an opportunity to speak with physicists and participate in experiments designed to give them an accurate understanding of what goes on at Fermilab, where scientists smash subatomic particles together to better understand the structure of matter.
In 1992, Fermilab dedicated its 8,500-square-foot Leon M. Lederman Science Education Center, which houses a student laboratory, classroom, exhibits, and a teacher resource center, among other things.
The lab offers training programs for teachers and has designed curriculum units that guide classes through one or two weeks of study before they visit Fermilab.
The education program also includes informal science classes for children and their families, Bardeen said.
The program seems to be accomplishing its goals.
“This is hands-on. It’s real world,” said David Holm, a teacher who accompanied the 110 7th graders from Batavia Middle School who visited the education center on Friday.
“This is the kind of thing that kids this age especially feed on,” Holm said. “For the kids who have those latent, undeveloped science skills, this can be a seedbed for getting those skills activated.”
Chas Berns, 12, one of the Batavia pupils, shared his teacher’s enthusiasm.
“It’s more real,” Chas said. “We get a lot more out of it and learn more.”
Added his classmate, Nicole Neuhalfen, also 12: “I think so, too. We learn a lot more actually doing it than reading. Here, you have to be paying attention to what you do.”
