Kermit Mckenzie Jr. High,Guadalupe

"The Bobcats"

We are a 6-8 grade school in the midst of fertile farmland on the west end of the Santa Maria Valley, just a couple of miles from where the river passes through the sand dunes and enters the Pacific Ocean.

Students in a few classes have worked with computers and design as part of some special projects .... but this year we're hooking up our computer lab direct line to the internet, so we're looking forward to jumping into all kinds of web publishing.

Special Projects:

County Connections Project: A history of Guadalupe, part 1.Classes from our school and the elementary school will be adding more as the new year progresses. (Check out projects done by other Santa Barbara County Schools) Guadalupe History

Weather Project: This is the 3rd year of interschool sharing of our weather studies. Eight other high schools and jr. highs in the Santa Maria Valley participate as part of a bigger "Science Partnership for School Innovation".(SPSI) We run a computer Bulletin Board System (BBS) for the interschool sharing, click to check out more on this very cool project.

Environmental Connections Project: We're planning to collaborate with students at Goleta Valley Junior High, and later other schools will join us, in studies of our local environment, including the ways that we impact the land, water and air. Last year Mckenzie 7th graders did field testing of the water quality along the Santa Ynez River and near us in Oso Flaco lake. Along with other schools we have raised and released salmon trout "fry" as part of the Central Coast Salmon Enhancement. Check out the project web site for more info and ideas. Environmental Connections Web page

MESA: This stands for Math,Engineering and Science Acheivment. Even though we compete against other school MESA clubs for rocket launching and at UCSB and then regional design competitions, this year we're hoping to get a non-competitive collaborative project going, where all 5 clubs in our area work on building their own radios, sharing advice and information on our BBS, and publishing designs later on the web.

Art....Mural Projects: For several years students have contributed to a mural that stretches for almost a full block along West Main Street coming into town. For two summers there were murals conceived and painted by gifted students from several grade levels. Click here for a portion of the Peace Mural (later we will set up a page of a variety of art ....the web is a great place to display good work.)

Technimagineering: We were fortunate to have some of our students selected for the pilot project. They'll get to work online with Mentors from UCSB and local high schools, learning among other things how to use the web to find great resources. The project is setting up some interactive math and science sites to spark ideas for creative projects and to link to other places on the web. We'll link to the Technimagineering sites from our pages as they are ready. Check them out!

Science Partnership For School Innovation (SPSI):

The partnership started with an educational outreach from two NSF funded advanced research labs at UC Santa Barbara. After successes with bringing in local high school students as working interns in the labs, UCSB's Graduate School of Education and the Santa Barbara County Education Office teamed up with the labs,QUEST and MRL, to hold a summer institute for science teachers.
Junior high and high school teachers representing almost every school in the county teamed by regions-Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Santa Ynez, and Santa Maria Valley to develop multi-year projects to improve science education locally, and to provide innovative models for school improvements in general.

Our Project: Our Santa Maria Valley team started with teachers from 7 schools from 4 different districts.Righetti and Santa Maria high schools, and Fesler, Lakeview, El Camino,Orcutt and Kermit Mckenzie Jr. High. Given the differences and distances involved, we decided to make a project that modeled a key component of science education and real science in practice......communication. We weren't real skilled w/ computers and electronic communications, but we figured that the challenge was worth it, so we created a model for electronic communication starting with the core activities involved in sharing locally gathered weather data, and the questions, problems, and resources we each come up with during our learning about...WEATHER.

We're entering our 3rd year of the project; gathering data from our schools' instruments daily (no matter what our science studies are), and sharing summaries via our FirstClass Bulletin Board System. The BBS is also stocked with software, labs and lessons, and all kinds of helpers for computer using students and teachers. Righetti has equipment to capture satellite images so we can compare our ground observations with the "eyes in the sky". Very neat! (Check out a picture sampler page...63k so it'll take a couple minutes to load) SPSI picture page

Here's a good web site if you want to see satellite pictures done by the pro's. (The students do just as good, sometimes better, by improving the images they capture in Photoshop) http://wxweb.msu.edu:80/weather/
As our weather project expands, we're going way beyond it, into other areas of collaborative study, more uses of technology to improve our appreciation and practice of science. Keep looking here for updates. For now, check out the developing site for related resources at The Environmental Connections Project

Kermit Mckenzie Jr. High ,Guadalupe Union School District, Box 788 Guadalupe, CA 93434

	We are a 6-8 grade school in the midst of fertile farmland on the west end of the Santa Maria Valley, just a couple of miles from where the river passes through the sand dunes and enters the Pacific Ocean.
	Students in a few classes have worked with computers and design as part of some special projects .... but this year we're hooking up our computer lab direct line to the internet, so we're looking forward to jumping into all kinds of web publishing.
	Special Projects: County Connections Project: A history of Guadalupe, part 1.Classes from our school and the elementary school will be adding more as the new year progresses. (Check out projects done by other Santa Barbara County Schools) Guadalupe History
	Weather Project: This is the 3rd year of interschool sharing of our weather studies. Eight other high schools and jr. highs in the Santa Maria Valley participate as part of a bigger "Science Partnership for School Innovation".(SPSI) We run a computer Bulletin Board System (BBS) for the interschool sharing, click to check out more on this very cool project.
	Environmental Connections Project: We're planning to collaborate with students at Goleta Valley Junior High, and later other schools will join us, in studies of our local environment, including the ways that we impact the land, water and air. Last year Mckenzie 7th graders did field testing of the water quality along the Santa Ynez River and near us in Oso Flaco lake. Along with other schools we have raised and released salmon trout "fry" as part of the Central Coast Salmon Enhancement. Check out the project web site for more info and ideas. Environmental Connections Web page
	MESA: This stands for Math,Engineering and Science Acheivment. Even though we compete against other school MESA clubs for rocket launching and at UCSB and then regional design competitions, this year we're hoping to get a non-competitive collaborative project going, where all 5 clubs in our area work on building their own radios, sharing advice and information on our BBS, and publishing designs later on the web.
	Art....Mural Projects: For several years students have contributed to a mural that stretches for almost a full block along West Main Street coming into town. For two summers there were murals conceived and painted by gifted students from several grade levels. Click here for a portion of the Peace Mural (later we will set up a page of a variety of art ....the web is a great place to display good work.)
	Technimagineering: We were fortunate to have some of our students selected for the pilot project. They'll get to work online with Mentors from UCSB and local high schools, learning among other things how to use the web to find great resources. The project is setting up some interactive math and science sites to spark ideas for creative projects and to link to other places on the web. We'll link to the Technimagineering sites from our pages as they are ready. Check them out!