--Lonnie Harp Meg Sommerfeld
As if operating a fleet of nuclear submarines were not enough, sailors at the Naval Submarine Base in Kings Bay, Ga., have been busy working at schools as well.
The base is home to submarines named after the states of Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and West Virginia, and some crews have formed ties to schools in their subs’ namesake states.
The children at those schools learn of the submariners’ routine, military life, and the task of maintaining and operating a sub-launched ballistic missile program. And they often benefit when crews, which alternate 90-day assignments at sea, are in their home port.
The crew of the USS Kentucky mounted a caravan to the 200-student Worthington Elementary School in Greenup County, Ky., this year and built a new playground and installed cable connections to the Internet. Before the maneuvers, students at the school had corresponded with the sailors.
Next year, the program may get a Western feel with the soon-to-be-commissioned Wyoming.
Making Their Mark
The Hathaway Brown School, a girls’ private school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, that offers prekindergarden through grade 12, has the first all-female team to take first place in the national Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science.
Although it was only the second time that Hathaway Brown students went to the contest, the 650-student school beat out about 1,500 other teams in the “smaller schools” division. Contest winners were announced last month.
As part of the competition, sponsored by the Junior Engineering and Technology Society for the past 17 years, students must solve multifaceted problems, such as designing an underground fuel-storage tank.
Don Southard, the science department chairman, said the girls triumphed because they often work in groups. “The girls said some of the boys got their questions and said, ‘I’ll take this one; you take that one.’ But they sat together with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and all these reference books and talked about the problems.”
Senior and team member Genevieve Mathieson said: “It does say that girls can do science just as well as anyone else, but we’ve all been taught that ... so we already believe it.”
