Aerospace Has a Challenge Closer to Home : Youths: Local club is example of how the industry can foster education in math and science.
For years, we advocates of space exploration have touted not only its scientific benefits but also the positive impact that ambitious space ventures have on educational and economic development.
It’s time for the aerospace community to demonstrate that impact. We have a special opportunity in Los Angeles because of the confluence of a large and changing aerospace industry with a larger and more changing social situation in our inner city.
The aerospace industry has had a great ride for many years, driven by an unrelenting Cold War necessity for weapons systems and American industrial dominance in aircraft and missiles. Those conditions have changed. A great deal of study and searching is going into questions of conversion, competitiveness and applicable roles for high technology engineering.
Some discussion, albeit with much less emphasis, has also focused on the changing social milieu in which the industry will operate and the economy will function. Los Angeles is changing. Within a few years, minorities will make up the majority of our work force. Yet the scientific and technical illiteracy in our youth is especially rampant in those same minorities.
Recently, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and astronaut Mae Jamieson visited the Challengers Boys and Girls Club in South-Central Los Angeles and announced funding of a science room in their proposed facility. I’ll bet that most aerospace executives don’t know of this remarkable club. I didn’t, until a couple of months ago. This largely unnoticed institution is performing a remarkable service for 2,200 boys and girls and their families in a disadvantaged community. At 50th and Vermont in the heart of South-Central, it runs all-day (12-hour days) educational, social and sport programs, six days a week. Its library is overcrowded with parents helping their children with homework. The computer room has kids pushing at the doorway to learn math, English and science with donated software and dedicated volunteer instructors. The gym, in immaculate condition, is home to three games at once--and dozens more kids are waiting their turn.
The Challengers Boys and Girls Club is an oasis of creativity and learning in a neighborhood more known for violence than for hope. And it is poised to do more. The club is planning a $7.5-million facility--a community center that should be a physical beacon to the Los Angeles inner city and a temporal beacon to the new millennium, showing our hope and optimism for the next generation.
The Southern California aerospace community should put some high-watt power into that beacon. It is we who are working for that positive new millennium outlook. It is we who need the next generation to be educated, and it is they who need our jobs. The link between the futuristic space industry planners and the vast underachieving, disadvantaged--but highly capable and necessary--youth of our community should be strong.
