School planetarium in jeopardy as times and teaching change

MOUNT VERNON - There's a little round building nestled on the campus of Mount Vernon High School that enables mere mortals to control the heavens and even travel back and forth in time - in a manner of speaking.

But whether this little planetarium will survive very far into the 21st century remains to be seen.

Planetariums date back hundreds of years. Back then, they were just drawings of star constellations sketched on building ceilings. Later, they were made into simple machines called orreys, after the Earl of Orrey, an Irish nobleman. These roughly showed the movement of the planets in the solar system.

The 1,018-square-foot planetarium was built in 1962, the days of Mercury's orbital space flights and visions of Americans and Soviets feverishly chasing each other into outer space.

Bill Hume, who taught science at the high school for 30 years until his retirement last summer, said he thinks the planetarium was a byproduct of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

"There was a lot of National Science Foundation money, space-race money, at the time," Hume said. "We went bonkers on the space age, and some of the money apparently trickled down to Mount Vernon."

Inside the small building is a sort of sanctuary dedicated to the consideration of the cosmos. At one end of the room is an insectlike device with a spherical head called a star projector. Points of light, representing the stars in the heavens, are projected onto the domed ceiling through tiny holes in the spherical projector. They can be moved and adjusted to show how the stars look now, or how they looked to the squinting eyes of, say, a Tyrannosaurus Rex millions of years ago.

Though a product of post-industrial America, the star projector itself has a sort of Gothic grace, silhouetted against walls that can, through a formidable console of dials and levers, glow with shades of light representing sunrise, sunset and all points in between. Along the tops of the walls in this cylindrical room is the cutout of a mountainous skyline against which the lights softly play.

Susan Nickelson, a part-time science teacher at Mount Vernon High, is a strong supporter of the planetarium and has used it for several classes in her few years at the school.

She spoke in excited tones about the potential the planetarium has to spark interest in students, even in this age of computer databases and the Internet.

"We want to bring kids in there for the love of looking at the sky, and that's how you get scientists," she said.

"When I go in, I tell of Cassiopeia the Queen and Perseus the Hero, and all the stories that go with them . . . You can capture some kid's imagination! It's more than just sitting in a classroom punching a computer."

Brad Snowder, who helps run the planetarium at Western Washington University in Bellingham, agreed.

"There's a certain cathedral effect, and ecclesiastical feel," Snowder said of the inside of a working planetarium, anywhere.

"Most of what people know about astronomy they learned from planetariums. They come to stargaze, and we slip them a little astronomy."

He said traditionally, planetariums are found at educational institutions or in museums. And though he said "they offer the community something they can't provide for themselves," they also often struggle for support against flashier attractions.

Each planetarium needs a champion, he said, to see that it is maintained and supported.

Since Hume retired, that's just what the Mount Vernon planetarium lacks, Nickelson said.

She uses the planetarium occasionally for science classes, but she's really the only one these days. And Nickelson said that in addition to her classes, young writers take advantage of the calm, slightly eerie setting for poetry readings every now and then.

But Nickelson said she'd like to see the planetarium used to greater advantage.

Remodeling plans uncertain

The Mount Vernon School District has many pressing facility needs and steadily growing student enrollment. District officials have said for years that they need to renovate the high school, and tried to pass a bond in 1999 to achieve that.

So far, the free-standing planetarium does not appear in early drawings of possible high school renovations.

"But it's not being counted out," said Barbara McCauley, the district's ranking facilities administrator. "And we're actually one of the only high schools in the area to have a planetarium."

"So far, the conversation has been that we want to keep the planetarium, but maybe not that planetarium," McCauley said.

She said that if the room taken up by the current planetarium is needed in remodeling, perhaps the planetarium could be built into a new structure, or installed on top of another building.

District Superintendent Mack Armstrong said the planning for renovation of the high school simply hasn't gotten far enough for him to know what to do with the planetarium.

Craig Harpel, chairman of the high school's science department, said he supports keeping the planetarium, even if it ultimately has to be moved.

"I don't know how sentimental we are in science about the specific building," he said. "The building itself is not that big a deal."

Still, Nickelson, who wants to continue teaching in a planetarium in Mount Vernon, worries about more than just the building.

Worried about lack of knowledge

"What I'm mostly worried about is a lack of knowledge about the planetarium," she said. "Bill Hume was our expert, and he's gone. What we need is money for him to come back and teach us how to use it."

Nickelson lost none of her passionate tone as she described the benefit she sees from working with the planetarium.

"One of my goals is, I want (the students) to learn the constellations and the names of stars. People say, `How is that important?' But I want them to be able to lie on the ground and look up and say, `I know this.' "