Funds give Cape NASA center extended influence around state

The federal government is pouring more money into Cape Girardeau's NASA Educator Resource Center so it can expand its staff -- beginning in March -- and carry out its statewide mission.

The center plans to open offices in St. Louis, Columbia and Kansas City by the end of March, and in two other cities -- Springfield and either Maryville or Kirksville -- in August.

The new centers will be set up in office space in the state's university-related professional development centers, which provide continuing education training for teachers.

The federal government, beginning last August and running to August 2007, will spend $2.6 million -- much of it on personnel -- to make available educational and instructional materials on science, mathematics and technology, deliver classroom presentations and provide teacher training workshops.

Dr. Ernest Kern, center director, said the money will be used to hire a new staff member for each of the satellite centers and continue operating the Cape Girardeau center. The local center has a full-time staff of three including the director and three to five student workers.

The funding includes $1.5 million announced in January and $1.1 million secured last year. Except for ongoing expenses at the Cape Girardeau center, little of the money has been spent yet except to advertise the new job openings in St. Louis, Columbia and Kansas City.

Kern, a longtime geosciences professor at Southeast Missouri State University, has directed the NASA center since it opened in November 1999 in a former bank building at 222 N. Pacific.

It operated initially on a $75,000 annual budget provided by the university and Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

But thanks to U.S. Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, federal dollars began flowing to the center, including a three-year, $500,000 grant in 2001. The center now operates entirely on federal money. However, it does get facilities assistance from the university, which provides the building that houses the center. Southeast also pays the utility bills.

Kern said the soon-to-be-filled jobs in St. Louis, Columbia and Kansas City have attracted 85 applicants for the approximately $30,000-a-year jobs.

The federal funding doesn't include all the workbooks, astronaut posters, mathematical games, educational videotapes and slides that NASA provides for free to its centers.

NASA in every state

Missouri's NASA center is one of 72 throughout the nation. There is at least one center in each of the 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Kern insists the tax dollars haven't been wasted at the Cape Girardeau center. Last year, the Cape Girardeau center dealt with 1,277 walk-in visitors, distributed more than 30,000 educational publications, provided 436 videotapes, 274 CD-ROMs and 23 sets of slides to teachers.

The center also conducted 81 workshops and presentations.

Kern said expanding the reach of the center through satellite offices will train more kindergarten through high school classroom teachers and provide presentations to more students on a variety of subjects such as math concepts and moon phases.

The goal, Kern said, isn't to get every student to become a scientist but to provide the background and exposure to science and math that will allow people to live and function successfully in the future.

That challenge was being worked on at the Jackson Middle School on Tuesday where Jackie Wortmann, facility coordinator of the NASA center in Cape Girardeau, taught sixth-graders about the phases of the moon.

She used a string stretched across the room to show the distance between scale models of the Earth and moon.

As part of the presentation, students iced cookies to show different phases of the moon.

"No licking," Wortmann advised students.

Sixth-grade teacher Debora Lintner said she learned about the NASA center through a teachers' workshop. But Lintner said many teachers aren't aware of the center and the resources it has.

"I don't think we utilize it as much as we could," she said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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