AUTOMOBILES : Toyota Foundation to Treat Santa Ana Fifth-Graders to Tour of the Heavens
Proving that you don’t need a car to take an unforgettable ride, the Toyota USA Foundation is funding a program to enable all fifth-graders in the Santa Ana Unified School District to cruise the heavens visually.
The charitable arm of Torrance-based Toyota Motor Sales USA is paying to send each fifth-grader--8,800 of them next year and in the 1995-96 school term--through Starlab, Orange County’s only portable planetarium.
The Toyota foundation, which emphasizes science and math programs, was asked to provided the nascent science center with the $15,000 it needed to acquire Starlab, said center development director Pamela Shambra. “But we only asked for funding for the planetarium,” she said. “When they wrote back, they said they’d not only pay for it but that they’d finance bringing the program to Santa Ana’s fifth-graders for two years.”
The total bill came to $64,000. For its money, Toyota gets its name on the planetarium wall.
Starlab, contained in an inflatable dome 21 feet in diameter and 11 feet high, reveals the planets and 4,000 or so stars that are visible at night.
It is not just open to Santa Ana’s fifth-graders. Part of the Launch Pad preview program for the science center, scheduled to open in 1997, Starlab is available to any school or group interested in science education, Shambra said.
Cost of the program, which comes to the school or other meeting facility, is $3.50 a person (the dome holds 30 at a time). To get more information or make reservations, call the Starlab coordinator at (714) 965-0818 or the science center office at (714) 540-2001.
