Rocket class comes to Solway School

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

May 11, 1997

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

SOLWAY -- Most kids have dreams of becoming an astronaut -- of floating weightless in space while the sun, moon and stars shine beyond their reach.

But just for a moment -- for a couple of hours Friday morning -- 56 Solway Elementary School fourth- and fifth-graders experienced what it was like to send a sleek, futuristic spacecraft off the launching pad as a crowd of spectators watched in awe.

The students were launching model rockets they had constructed last week with the help of Bemidji State University space studies students -- a project made possible by the federal government's Space Grant program, established to fund learning opportunities for students at all levels to learn about space.

Solway School fifth-graders have been launching rockets for a number of years as a practical application of their science and math curriculum, but this year the school was only a stone's throw away from canceling the project.

The school's budget was too tight to purchase the rockets, and the stress of guiding a group of fifth-graders through the building stages was getting too great for the small staff at the school. Fourth-grade teacher Rob Beyer and fifth-grade teacher Michelle Dahlby were the only staff available to help the students.

That's when John Annexstad, BSU's space studies professor, stepped in with the aid of the Space Grant and the support of his students. He had heard from a friend who worked at Solway School about the loss of the rocket project, and couldn't let it happen.

"I told them Space Grant would like to sponsor the event in two ways. We would buy the rockets, and we would have the students of Advanced Planetology come out here and assist them," he said. "At the federal level, they have said that Space Grant should not be involved only on the college level. They want them in the K-12 schools. This was exactly the kind of thing Washington wants us to do."

Annexstad granted the school $300 to purchase the rockets, and the school decided to add the fourth-graders into the project for the first time.

Now, according to Beyer, the fourth-graders will be around next year when another class of students will need help in constructing their own rockets. In addition, he said, the teachers will have the opportunity to involve more math in the project -- such as ratios and proportions -- by letting students design their own rockets. This year they constructed rockets from kits which were partially assembled.

"Boy, we couldn't have done it without (the BSU students)," Beyer said. "It's so hard to do with just two people handling 30 kids. There's more enthusiasm this year and less frustration because of the BSU students."

Krista Boergeroff, a sophomore elementary education major who coordinated the week of construction and Friday's launch, said about 20 BSU students spent an hour a day all last week helping the kids build rockets. Each one helped out a group of two or three Solway students.

"It was so much fun, I couldn't believe it, and it is great to know we boosted their knowledge about NASA and the space program," she said as she kept kids in line during Friday's launch. "There's one little boy who wants to be an astronaut, and he thinks this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to him."

Only time will tell if any of the 56 children takes the lessons they learned last week with them into space as an astronaut.

But for a moment -- for a couple of hours Friday morning -- there were 56 glossy-eyed children at Solway School staring far into the sky, dreaming the impossible and thinking, "This is one large step for man, and one giant leap for mankind."