[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 28 (Thursday, March 10, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H1330-H1331]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          FREDERICKSBURG, TEXAS, HIGH SCHOOL AEROSPACE PROGRAM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Conaway) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, the newsprint, the television media, and I 
notice even in this House, as in a couple of speakers ago, we are 
constantly bombarded with stories of the youth in our communities, in 
our cities, in our towns that are doing bad things, young men and women 
who are making some bad choices, and some of them very grievous and 
extremely bad choices. They get an awful lot of the air time on 
television and in newsprint.
  I am standing before you today, Mr. Speaker, to point out a group of 
young men and women in Fredericksburg, Texas, who are, I think, at the 
absolute other end of the spectrum from those who we typically see in 
our newspapers.
  I want to talk briefly this afternoon about the Fredericksburg High 
School Aerospace Program. This is a voluntary program, an elective 
program that students in Fredericksburg High School can participate in. 
Their mission each year is pretty straightforward. The first day of 
class the teacher writes the problem on the board, and then they have 
to solve it. They will spend the entire year solving that problem.
  The problem that Mr. Williams, the founding father of this program, 
gives his class, their mission, is to put a 35-pound scientific 
experiment 100,000 feet into the air. And that is it. This group of 
young men and women then begin to break up into teams, teams that will 
help do the design. There will be young men and women who may be good 
at physics and other math skills; there will be teams that are good at 
marketing and they will be out trying to scrounge and acquire the 
necessary information and materials to solve the problem each step of 
the way.
  There is no text book. These young men and women are solving this 
particular problem from scratch. Mr. Williams is there to keep them 
between the white lines, but he is also there to let them make 
mistakes. As they go down paths that do not solve the problem, they 
learn from those mistakes and then go back to the drawing board, so to 
speak, to accomplish their mission.
  SAT scores at Fredericksburg High School have risen 200 points as a 
result, in their minds, as a result of this cross-disciplinary process 
that goes on within this particular classroom. Also,

[[Page H1331]]

these young men and women, 80 percent of them go on to engineering 
degrees in colleges.
  I am not sure of the exact statistics, but China is producing a 
staggering number of engineers greater than we are in this country, and 
that ought to give us all pause for concern. If America wants to remain 
competitive in whatever arena, look at the advantages all these 
engineers being trained in China will give them over us, as we produce 
fewer engineers, should give each of us pause on a variety of levels.
  These young men and women go on to school to further their careers. 
They work in teams. They learn to use skills and techniques and 
processes that serve them well in the real world by working in groups, 
small groups and large groups, to accomplish this program. They design 
this vehicle from nose cone to nozzle, including the propulsion 
systems.
  Now, once they have the design done, they then build the rocket. They 
build the 35-pound test module that they are going to send 100,000 feet 
into the air. They build it from scratch. They do all the electrical 
work; they do all of the construction work that they can. They then 
begin to look for contributions from companies that might be in this 
business or in allied businesses, looking for the nozzle parts, looking 
for the parts of the nose cone, the fuel systems, and those kinds of 
things, because they do not have money that goes with this. This is all 
part of the program of living in the real world, looking at problems 
and trying to figure out how to solve them.
  Some of the accomplishments of the Fredericksburg High School and 
this team is the first high school to break the sound barrier with 
their rocket.

                              {time}  1530

  They are also the high school that has launched the largest, fastest 
vehicle to the highest altitude at a Federal missile range, White Sands 
Missile Range outside Alamogordo. That is a top accomplishment for a 
group of high school students.
  This program, in its seventh or eighth year, is being developed in a 
manner that will allow it to be replicated in other high schools across 
the Nation, providing an opportunity to incent and interest our young 
men and women in positive programs doing things and doing those things 
well.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today to point this out to my colleagues here in 
the House. I hope that the good citizens throughout the 11th 
Congressional District of Texas and throughout the United States will 
recognize these accomplishments, will look for their own communities to 
say: We have some kids that are as bright and as smart as the kids in 
Fredericksburg, Texas; I wonder why we cannot beat their record, why we 
cannot put a 35-pound payload 100,000 feet into the air and recover it 
intact. It is a great accomplishment that is going on in 
Fredericksburg, Texas. This is a great opportunity to recognize the 
wonderful things being done by these students, in contrast to all the 
bad things that we hear in the press.

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