Local News - February 2003

Fifth-graders honor astronauts

By JEREMY ASHTON, LTN Staff Writer

February 5, 2003 - DENVER — The fifth-graders in Jacque Weaver’s class at Rock Springs Elementary School never met Ilan Ramon, but they felt a certain connection to him.

The students learned all about the Israeli astronaut and followed his progress during his 16-day science mission on the space shuttle Columbia. But they never saw him return home.

Weaver’s students and the rest of the Rock Springs fifth-grade held a brief ceremony Monday to honor Ramon and the six other Columbia astronauts who died Saturday in an explosion over Texas.

The ceremony at Rock Springs marked a relatively low-key remembrance of the shuttle crew in Lincoln County Schools. No assemblies were planned, but flags at every school flew at half-mast, and teachers openly discussed the tragedy with their students.

Weaver, whose students spent a couple of weeks studying the Columbia mission, wanted her class to do something more than talk about what happened.

“This is a very close class; they’re very caring in general,” she said. “I knew that I was going to have to do something for them to express their emotions in an appropriate manner.”

Principal Glenda Walker opened the morning at Rock Springs with a moment of silence and read a poem over the intercom called “High Flight” by John Gellespie McGee Jr.

Later that morning, Weaver’s students started writing their own poems, using the name “Columbia” as an acronym for their thoughts. Several of the students remembered Ramon as they wrote.

“We had kind of grown attached to him because we read about him,” Nicholos Whitlock said.

In the afternoon, the students gathered in front of the school and read their poems to the rest of the fifth-grade. Seven students, each holding a piece of paper with the name of an astronaut on it, planted miniature U.S. flags around the flagpole.

“We were really sad about everything that happened, and we just though we could express how we felt through the poem,” Erika Ulrich said.

Teachers at Catawba Springs talked to their students about the history of space travel with the depth of the conversation depending on their age level.

Principal Mitch Eisner said a counselor was also available just in case any students needed to talk about the incident.

“Any time you’re dealing with something that is as tragic as that, you want to handle it in a sensitive way,” he said.

Unlike the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the shuttle explosion wasn’t quite as personal for most students, allowing educators to handle it differently.

“You can make it more of an educational tool when it’s not that close to home,” Assistant Principal Anita Robinson said.

On the high school level, some classes held open discussions about the disaster and the space program.

Debbie Michael, who teaches astronomy at East Lincoln High during the fall semester, devoted part of her classes Tuesday to getting student reaction.

Michael said most were very sad for the families of the astronauts. A few of her students, however, wondered why the loss of the shuttle warrants more coverage than an airplane crash.

“It’s sort of interesting that some of them seemed to feel the media had put too much emphasis on it,” Michael said.

Despite the loss, Michael believes NASA will bounce back, just as it did after the shuttle Challenger was lost in 1986.

“I think, if anything, this will cause improvements in the space program,” she said.

© 2001 Lincoln Times-News  

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