Thoughts on world champs, campus crime, youthBRADENTON HERALD EDITORIAL | Southeast team victorious with powerful race cars
27 September 2010
Von: Bradentom.com
We are the champions ... of the world. That lyric from Queen’s famous 1977 power ballad befits the Southeast High students who won the Formula One In Schools World Championship this week in Singapore.That crown ought to look good on the resumes of seniors Tony Griffin, Brandon Miranda and Yatrik Solanki; junior Amanda Clark and graduate Mark Nanney, along with the sixth team member, Nieman Pest, a Roanoke, Va., middle school student. The team built 14 miniature balsa wood race cars powered by CO2 that could speed up to 45 miles per hour. We marvel that such a soft wood even holds together with such an explosive force.
These promising future engineers spent 500 hours on the design and manufacturing, showing impressive dedication and perseverance. In today’s short attention span culture, that’s even more remarkable. The team, known as Unitus Racing, captured the coveted F1 title not just with one of the top speeds — two hundredths of a second off the top mark — but by completing other facets of the three-day competition with consistently outstanding scores: an eight-minute verbal presentation, a defense of their manufacturing process as judged by two engineers, a technical inspection, a pit display and a 20-page portfolio of their work. Yikes, that sounds grueling. Watch a video of the team’s race cars shooting down the F1 competition track and an interview with team members; it’s attached to this story at bradenton. com/opinion. Those Indy-style cars zip down the track in an amazing blur. Unitus Racing returns tonight — bearing a 14-pound trophy. Our hearty congratulations, world champs. Texting school crime tips Great ideas often take time to gain traction. Campus CrimeStoppers is one of those. Now in its fourth year in the Manatee County School District, the program wisely added another feature beyond phone calls, secret meetings and online tips about crime. Now students can text in alerts, which gives an extra measure of anonymity to anonymous tips. Nobody can overhear, nobody can watch. That should help build on the program’s mounting success — from just four tips the first year, in 2007, to 30 last year, which led to 39 arrests. Since the debut of Campus CrimeStoppers, the 84 tips have yielded 98 arrests. Cheers to the students who step up, fight crime and boost public safety — and who don’t worry about such nonsense as being labeled a snitch. When that attitude prevails, people end up getting needlessly hurt. Tops for youth programs We, too, heard the snickering over a headline this week: “Bradenton named among best for young.” But it’s true under the criteria that America’s Promise Alliance uses to select the nation’s 100 Best Communities for Young People. Bradenton and Manatee County are truly blessed with an abundance of youth programs that provide leadership and service opportunities, and with a profusion of citizens who put children first. Programs that focus on keeping children in school and preparing youth for college and the workforce are a high priority here. The honor is not about things to do or places to go. So stop the snickering. |