June 13, 2008

A team from McCabe Junior High School in the small farmworker community of Mendota that beat tough competition in recent state runoffs at California State University, Fresno, will represent California in national engineering design competition.

Students Adelmo Alvarado, Edgar Juarez, Francisco Torres and Angel Hernandez will be in Baltimore, Md., on June 20-21 for the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) National Finals.

MESA supports educationally disadvantaged students so they can go to college and major in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. McCabe is among 22 schools (11 high schools, 11 middle schools) near Fresno served by the MESA center headquartered at Fresno State, one of 60 centers in California. MESA designs activities for 14,000 pre-college students in the state.

The McCabe team won its championship at Fresno State in May.

McCabe, which has fewer than 400 students, is ranked among the state’s lowest-performing 20 percent of public schools, said Louie Lopez, director of Fresno State’s MESA, who oversees all MESA activities at the program’s schools.

“Yet these students are out-performing their peers in math, science and physics,” Lopez said.

In the competition, students design and build a trebuchet, which is a mechanical artillery engine similar to a catapult. Entries are evaluated for distance, accuracy and power, and students must submit papers, develop exhibits and provide oral presentations regarding the physics principles embodied by their machines.

Nineteen preliminary competitions were held throughout the state to narrow the field to four regional team winners in high school and middle school divisions for the state runoffs May 12, which McCabe.

The McCabe students depart Wednesday, June 18, for the national competition at the University of Maryland in Baltimore against students from MESA programs in seven other states. They will be accompanied by David Sackrison, a McCabe industrial technology and MESA teacher who also is the program adviser

Lopez noted that the McCabe team has become a major source of pride to Mendota, a western Fresno community of around 10,000 residents, most of them low-income farmworkers.

Lopez said former McCabe principal Manuel Escandon, now with the Fresno County Office of Education, was so excited that he used his own money to buy each team member a duffel bag with new clothing to wear in Baltimore.

Lopez said that although most of the schools served by MESA are among lowest performing in California, 62 percent of MESA students complete University of California and California State University academic college preparatory courses, nearly twice the level of nonparticipants. .