Students’ Lesson on Space Ends With Silence, Tears

The children were crammed into cafeterias and libraries. Some were giggling and squirming in their chairs. Others sat, hunkered down, their eyes glued to wide-screen TVs. A few cheered as they watched the takeoff of the space shuttle Challenger.

Then, suddenly, they fell silent. Some began to cry.

This scene was repeated in classrooms across the United States as the realization began to take hold Tuesday for more than 2.5 million schoolchildren: Not only had a spacecraft exploded in midair for the first time but the lives of seven Americans--and one of their own, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher--had been lost in the tragic accident.

“Oh, Mom, we saw the most terrible thing today,” 10-year-old Jonathan Gee of Clinton, Conn., said when he telephoned his mother at work. “ . . . The teacher started to cry when she talked about it. She said we would remember this our whole life. She was talking about the teacher who was taking the ride.”

School districts in thousands of communities, including Los Angeles, had required their students to watch Challenger liftoff and to monitor its progress over the next week as part of Classroom Earth, the first educational program designed to provide students with a firsthand look at America’s space program. The program was to have included school science lessons broadcast live by PBS from the shuttle later this week by New Hampshire teacher McAuliffe, the first schoolteacher to enter space.

Hall High School in Spring Valley, Ill., was the headquarters for Classroom Earth, which was to use more than 2,000 satellite dishes to link schools and relay classroom materials for participating teachers and schools.

At the shuttle liftoff Tuesday, 400 students gathered in a Hall High cafeteria. Many sat inside a roped-off area the size and shape of the Challenger spacecraft--an attempt to give students a sense of being inside Challenger.

The teen-agers sighed and cheered as the launching began--live from NASA via satellite--on a wide-screen TV.

Suddenly, as the fiery image filled the screen, there was silence.

Chris Leonatti, a 17-year-old senior, began to cry. Brian Tieman, 16, sitting in the “cargo bay” of the makeshift “shuttle,” was too stunned to cry. A few, uncertain what to do, giggled.

Walter Westrum, superintendent of the school and executive director of the project that brought live pictures of the shuttle to schools all over the country, rose to face his students.

“Hush down,” he began uncertainly. “What we’re seeing is, apparently, it’s hard to believe, but it looks like those people have just exploded in mid-air.”

A few moments later he added: “This is not some make-believe world, not ‘Miami Vice,’ not entertainment you’re looking at. These people are not coming back. They are wherever they are--and the dream that went with them is temporarily gone.”

Because interest in space travel has waned in recent years, it was the first serious glimpse of the space program for many younger children--and, for most, it was a sad and troubling sight.

“Was it a bomb?” cried one first-grader at St. Rose of Lima School in Denver, Colo., after seeing a TV replay of the explosion.

At the Alta Loma Elementary School near downtown Los Angeles, one third-grader was angry at NASA for failing to build a capsule that could eject the crew members. Another expressed concern that a different fuel should have been used. A third child was convinced that there was some sort of sabotage, said their teacher Alonzo Grant.

At the McCall-Donnelly Elementary School, in McCall, Ida., some students were so upset they had to be sent home. Many cried, said Principal John Wall. The McCall-Donnelly school, in a resort town of 2,000, is where Barbara Morgan, the alternate for the Challenger mission, teaches.

Brenda Lantow, a media technician at Gompers Secondary School in San Diego said she was taping the liftoff with the assistance of students.

“We were . . . cheering and laughing and saying ‘Don’t you wish you were there?’ and then it blew up in our face,” Lantow recalled Tuesday morning.

Georgianna Newman, a teacher at Chandler Elementary School in Van Nuys, said that on Monday she had had her second-graders write a letter to McAuliffe--Christa, as she was called by many students.

“They told her,” Newman said, “what they would be looking for during the mission. When they saw a tape of the launch, they became unglued. They couldn’t believe it was true.”

Extraordinary Reactions

The emotional reactions from both schoolchildren and teachers was extraordinary and it suggested the range of their feelings--from jealousy that they weren’t part of the mission before the flight took off, to relief that they weren’t victims after the crash occurred, to enormous grief for the crew and their families. But the identification with Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to be sent into space, was universal. McAuliffe was more than an ordinary astronaut. She was mother, wife and teacher.

“They see a mother, a teacher, all the emblems of security destroyed in front of their very eyes,” said Dr. Donald J. Cohen, director of the Yale University Child Student Center. “The child’s fantasy is there will be Superman to rescue her . . . and there is no Superman.”

Dr. Lee Salk, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, said: “Initially, there will be disbelief. Children have become desensitized from seeing things exploding on Saturday TV cartoons,” But he warned that, “It is an important time for children to be together with the parents who love them. It is an appropriate time for tears and sadness. . . . It is important to let children realize she was a heroine. She will be sorely missed.”

Dr. William Chambers, director of pediatric psychiatry at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, agreed that for children, losing a teacher can sometimes be almost as significant as the death of a parent. “Each kid extrapolates what it means to him,” he said, “but with some kids, it confirms their worst fears that the black night wins.”

Scientific Lessons

Some critics had argued that the shuttle flight with a teacher aboard was merely a public relations project for President Reagan and a device to draw attention away from the shuttle’s use for military purposes, but Bill Aldridge, executive director of the 50,000-member National Science Teachers’ Assn., said that was not his group’s position. There were, he said, valuable scientific lessons that could be learned from the shuttle, which is why it was being so widely viewed by students.

“Instead,” said Bill Honig, California’s superintendent of public instruction, who asked that flags in the state’s schools be flown at half-staff, “teachers, students and all of us are learning very different lessons today. Lessons about bravery, sacrifice and the fragility of life.

“We grieve for the families of all the astronauts and are reminded that those who probe the frontiers of knowledge, do so taking tremendous risks. Christa McAuliffe will be especially remembered by those of us in the school community. She joins women like Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie, who have given their lives opening new frontiers.”

Some educators likened the schoolchildren’s reaction to that of more than two decades ago on the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.

Times staff writers John J. Goldman and Elizabeth Mehren in New York, Scott Kraft in Chicago and Leonard Bernstein, Bill Billiter, Scott Harris, Pamela Moreland and Carol McGraw in Southern California also contributed to this report.