Budget Ax Imperils Contest

Before the eggs dropped and balsa wood planes glided, a group of students from Nightingale Middle School kicked off Saturday’s math and science competition by recounting to 400 students their recent trip to Sacramento to protest Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut funding for outreach programs like theirs.

At the microphone, Michelle Tran, 14, asked how many were participating in the Math, Engineering and Science Achievement (MESA) finals for the first time. About half stood.

“Do you want this to be your last?” she said.

“No!” the students shouted.

Then, she said, “Go out there and do something about it.”

As nearly 2,000 middle and high school students from across California gathered in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Riverside on Saturday to compete in three regional tournaments, many worried that these would be the final contests.

The 34-year-old statewide math and science program, which prepares poor and minority students for college, is one of several outreach and college-preparatory programs to be eliminated next school year under the governor’s budget proposal as he seeks to eliminate a $14-billion shortfall.

“We raise aspirations. We convince students that college is attainable,” said Michael Aldaco, executive director of MESA in California. “We educate them about what it takes to get there.

“To eliminate it would send a tremendously negative message,” he said.

The competition at Cal State L.A. brought finalists from nearly 35 schools. To get this far, some had won earlier contests by building balsa wood planes that flew farther than others. Some had beaten competitors in egg-packaging contests by cushioning them with rice and hamburger buns to withstand a three-story fall.

Others had created Web pages in 30 minutes, and would be challenged to do so again Saturday. Some would be judged on the blue crystals they had grown from copper sulfate, or models of the human eye they had built using manicotti, black-eyed peas and egg chow mein.

“This ties in the hands-on with the theoretical,” said Wright Middle School teacher Julian Edwards. “It gives kids the visions, ideas, work ethic, process. All the things a scientist goes through.”

Edwards coached his student Kenji Hashimura, 13, through the balsa glider contest.

After sketching his design on paper, Hashimura built a plane out of the lightweight, bendable wood and assembled it with metallic tape.

On Saturday, he launched it with a giant rubber band, made of 460 smaller rubber bands tied together. It soared, landing about 55 feet away.

MESA began in California in 1970, a reaction to the low number of minorities enrolled in math and science degree programs, Aldaco said. Since then, it has served 175,000 students, including nearly 16,000 this year, he said.

The students work with scientists, engineers and mathematicians and participate in after-school and weekend sessions, as well as lessons during regular class periods. The program has expanded into 11 states, including Oregon, New York, Colorado and Maryland.

Eliminating MESA and other programs would save about $85 million next school year, said H.D. Palmer, deputy director of the state Department of Finance and Schwarzenegger’s spokesman on the budget.

“Given the ugly fiscal reality that we’ve had to confront ... we tried within higher education to target savings in areas that were outside of the core academic and core instructional areas,” Palmer said.

Cutting money for outreach programs that serve kindergarten through 12th-grade students would avoid deeper cuts to college students’ classes, he said.

Leaders from the University of California and California State University, which sponsor the outreach programs, are fighting to save them. They hope to change Schwarzenegger’s mind by the time the revised state budget comes out next month.

“We do believe these programs are valuable at improving academic achievement and college preparation, particularly for students who are academically disadvantaged,” said Hanan Eisenman, a spokesman for the UC system. “We don’t want to give them up.”

Supporters say they are invaluable to maintaining diverse college campuses, especially since affirmative action was banned in California in 1996.

“Math and science is probably the best place to invest in if the nation is going to be competitive in the global market,” said Kuei-Wu Tsai, dean of the Cal State L.A. engineering college. These students “will become the scientists and engineers.”

Other programs that may be eliminated involve counseling and helping students prepare for tests and college admission.

On Saturday, Annie Steward, 13, and Corinne Jones, 12, both students at La Tijera School in Inglewood, waited for their egg package to plunge from the third floor of Martin Luther King Memorial Hall. They had put four raw eggs in hamburger buns, Styrofoam and bubble wrap.

The pair qualified for the final tournament after beating others in their school when they dropped egg packages from the top of a campus bungalow.

“It’s our first year of being in MESA, and now we may be the last class in our school,” Jones said.

“There’s got to be another program they can cut,” Steward said.

Her mother, Darlene Steward, said she has noticed her daughter’s grades rise since she started participating in the program.

“I just wish there was some kind of way we could keep it going,” she said. “I would take out a loan from my bank if I could.”