Like a Sunday morning preacher, 14-year-old Sherita Jones gathered her flock of 6th graders from Chicago’s South Side into a circle. On any other day, they would have prayed for the basics: getting to school safely or playing without the pop of gunfire.
But here on a quiet Wisconsin shoreline at Fisherman’s Road pier, far from the troubles of inner-city life, the children bowed their heads without worry:
“Lord, could you please let our rocket go really, really far and please don’t let it break because we worked really hard on it.”
Amen.
This was the most pressing need Saturday for the students from Beethoven School. Along with 18 students from Clemente High School on the Northwest Side of Chicago, they became the first Illinois schools to take part in an unusual field trip 150 miles from the city.
Based in Sheboygan, Wis., on Friday and Saturday, the Rockets for Schools program is a hands-on approach to science in which students build rockets and launch them off the shoreline over Lake Michigan. Each rocket has an experiment on board and the students are in charge of monitoring, tracking and recording their rocket’s activity.
Initiated in Wisconsin in 1996, the program expanded to include students from Michigan last year and now students from Illinois and Iowa. About 500 students participate in the event, with approximately 8,000 spectators.
But the trip represented so much more than rocket science for the students from Beethoven and Clemente, both troubled schools in high-risk areas plagued with poverty.
Irene DeMota, the interim principal at Clemente, said: “It’s crossing the boundaries of our tiny little neighborhoods and finding we are a part of a larger world.”
Indeed, one of the goals of the program is to introduce the many aspects of space technology to students, with an emphasis on engineering, meteorology and environmental monitoring.
“As far as career options, they have to see that these are real choices as opposed to what they see over there (in their neighborhoods), so that’s why we’re here,” said Beethoven teacher Elaine Granger.
And some of the students said they were initially nervous that as minorities from the notorius Robert Taylor Homes and Humboldt Park neighborhoods, they would feel out of place among the Iowa and Wisconsin students. Instead, they exchanged names and addresses.
“We didn’t get stared at and we didn’t stare back,” said Esther Delvalle, 15, a Clemente student. “Everyone was real nice and positive.”
Bob Justus, the Illinois representative of the Aerospace States Association, a main sponsor of the program, was instrumental in bringing the Chicago schools to Wisconsin this weekend. Justus said he hopes to bring the program into Illinois, possibly launching rockets from the Chicago shoreline.
“I would love to launch off of Navy Pier,” he said Saturday.
The students began building their rockets about three months ago with step-by-step kits supplied by the Rockets for Schools program. Between 5- and 6-feet-tall, the rockets were then painted, filled with experiments and given names like “Latin Spice” or “Space Cadettes.”
