NEWS AND EVENTS
We are excited to announce our Second Annual Oak Park Fore! the Schools golf tournament. We have worked closely with the course to comply with all State and County COVID requirements. In order to be in full compliance, we are currently unable to host a dinner or live auction after golfing is completed. While we did have to scale back from our first tournament we still will provide the following: Range Balls and use of the practice facilities will be available prior to your round. A box lunch including beverage for all participants to bring with you on the course. The event will be a scramble style tournament and will include additional prize events on specific holes. After completion of your round we will have a brief award ceremony, to include a raffle and silent auction items Should protocols change between now and the tournament adjustments to add to or scale back to make sure we have a safe event. If for any reason the event needs to be canceled or reschedule we will provide a full refund. We hope you can join us for a fun and relaxing day.
The National Fly Off held in The Plains, VA on Saturday, May 18 was special in that the event was dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that culminated in the landing on the moon on July 20, 1969. In honor of that the Oak Park team dressed in vintage 1969 Mission Control outfits. Complete with short-sleeve white shirts and skinny ties. Here are our results: 1st Place in Presentation – $500 prize, 1st Place in Outreach – $500 prize and 21st Place in Flying Due to this, the team has been invited to participate in the NASA Student Launch Initiative for the next school year. The program involves designing and building a large high-power rocket under the direction and supervision of NASA engineers over the course of the year. It culminates in the team launching the rocket at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL in April 2020. Dr. Tony Knight that leads the Rocket Club stated. “The students are super excited to say the least. They did an amazing job in their work this year and the presentation they gave at the finals was complete and informative. Their outreach program for the year involved presenting at the California State STEAM Conference in Long Beach, helping children build rockets at the Wings Over Camarillo Air Show, showing rockets at the elementary school Science Nights, STEM Day at the Oak Park Library, and more.” Students on the team are: Andrew Wells – Captain, Matthew Jarecky, Charlie Nicks, Charlotte Love, Alexander Kaufman, Koby Yousem, Haniah Hamza and Zoe Berger These two students were on the other of the two teams we had but came to the finals to assist with logistics and other tasks. They will be on the NASA SLI Team: Forest Siewert and Matin Nawabi. STATEMENT BY TONY KNIGHT: This was an extraordinary authentic learning experience for our students. Their outreach project and presentation required them to develop a deeper understanding of their work so that they could share it with others. They were able to generate enthusiasm for rocketry, aviation, and space exploration, capitalizing on the natural interests in these topics of both children and adults. The TARC parameters were particularly challenging this year and to finish 21st out of 900 teams in the nation, showed that they were able to problem-solve, be creative, and test and fly, test and fly. This is what engineers to when they are designing airplanes and rockets. Earning an opportunity to participate in the NASA Student Launch Initiative will allow the students to take what they have learned this year to an even higher level, working with NASA engineers on a complex large rocket project and launching it at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Al in April 2020. The Rocket Club is always looking for more sponsors – would you like to join our team? Your logo will appear on our TARC Rocket that we hope will be flown at the National Fly-Off outside of Washington D.C. this coming May. Be a part of it! Call Dr. Tony Knight at 818.735.3206 or email him at tknight@oakparkusd.org
https://www.vcoe.org/news/ArticleID/4577/Getting-Girls-into-Te chnology-is-Personal-for-this-Oak-Park-Grad#.XO01UceJkOk.twitter
On Saturday, April 27, Oak Park Education Foundation held an end-of-year fundraiser at The Stonehaus in Westlake Village. There were over 85 guests at the sold out event. Many new OPUSD familes attended, along with OPEF board members, PTO presidents, and top donors. An overview presentation of OPEF was conducted by OPEF board member, Carmela Barbieri. A special thank you to Carmela Barbieri and her husband Roberto Piolanti for sponsoring the Stonehaus and OPEF fundraiser. OPEF is looking forward to many more successful future events, to meet our goals for the students of Oak Park schools. We are ecstatic to report that we met our goal of $10,000 in donations contributed by our fundraiser attendees! OPEF is inspired by their enthusiastic participation in our efforts to raise funds towards sustaining programs our children greatly benefit from within OPUSD, and we look forward to their long-lasting partnership with the foundation.
Click on the image below to read OPUSD’s “The SCHOOL WATCH” Community Newsletter – Winter 2019 Edition
Did you know that 48% of the student population at OPUSD are students who live outside of the district in the surrounding areas of Oak Park? That’s almost half of the student population commuting Monday through Friday to attend the excellent, high-performing schools in the city of Oak Park. One thing we love about OPUSD is that it’s open to everyone who wants to attend – a District of Choice (DOC) school system. Without our DOC students, OPUSD schools wouldn’t be the distinctive, diverse, and exceptional institutions that they are today! Because of that, Oak Park Education Foundation hosted our first mixer on March 16th for our Simi Valley & Moorpark DOC families to show our appreciation for their dedication to education. It was a lively afternoon filled with conversation for the adults and fun St. Patrick’s Day activities for the kids! OPEF looks forward to future events with our DOC families to not only get to know them better, but also to partner alongside them to build a better future for our children. A special thank you to DOC parents, Phil & Reese Loos, for spending their time putting this beautiful event together and graciously opening up their home.
Congratulations to our OPUSD students for winning a 3 spots in the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals, taking place at Michigan State University on May 22-25! Over 800 teams from around the world compete in the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals, and we are thrilled to have so many Oak Park students make it this far! On Saturday, March 2, nine OPUSD teams won ten awards at the Odyssey of the Mind Southern California State Tournament at UC Riverside. Four of these teams are from MCMS and advanced to compete at the State Tournament on March 23 at UC Riverside. The following 3 teams secured their spots at World Finals! Elementary Team with students from ROES & OHES Team Members: Kainoa Ginter, Gloria Koo, Keiona Nadig, Arnav Saxsena, Anjali Staschik State Result: Tied 2nd place for Problem 4, Division 1 (Elementary) Middle School Team with students from MCMS Team Members: Jashwanth Bamidi, Matthew Horowitz, Ayan Khare, Hitkunwar Rajput, Devam Shah, Aniket Subramanian State Result: 2nd Place for Problem 4, Division 2 (Middle School) High School Team with students from OPHS & MCMS Team Members: Thaen Ananda, Hana Chizzo, Harshitha Dasari, Neha Jag, Ananda Kinkaid, & Minnoli Nori State Result: 1st place for Problem 3, Division 3 (High School)
The Rocket Club has been working hard on the Team America Rocketry Challenge – TARC. You can learn more about this national contest sponsored by the major aerospace industry partners, NASA, and the U.S. Dept. of Defense here: https://rocketcontest.org .
The Oak Park Rocket and Aviation Team consists of 24 students in grades 9-12 from Oak Park High School in Ventura County, California. Boeing is the primary sponsor of the team. The team participates in the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), which is the world’s largest rocket contest. Since 2012, the team has made it to the national finals in Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia three times by designing and building a rocket to fly to exact specifications and finishing in the top 100 teams out of over 900 in the U.S. The team rocket always sports a Boeing logo. In 2016 the rocket was named the Boeing 100 after the 100th anniversary of the Boeing Company and this past year it was named the Dash 10 after the newest version of the 787. Team members display their rocket at a Congressional Reception held the day before the national fly-off in the presence of government and industry officials. This past year, the guest speaker was Celena Dopart, a human factors systems engineer for Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, who took time to come and talk to the Oak Park team. In addition to the TARC program, students on the OPHS Rocket and Aviation Team have all earned their National Association of Rocketry (NAR) High Power Level 1 licenses and regularly build and fly large rockets to over a mile high at FAA-approved launches in the Mojave Desert, the birthplace of modern aviation and spaceflight. The team members have also learned to fly drones in a safe and legal manner. The team mentor, Dr. Tony Knight, who is also the superintendent of the Oak Park Unified School District has become an FAA certified commercial drone pilot for the purpose of teaching students about this new technology and holds a NAR Level 2 Rocketry License. In 2013, the team was only one of 20 high schools in the U.S. to participate in the NASA Student Launch Initiative where they launched an 11-foot tall rocket with a scientific payload near the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. The team traveled to Nebraska in August of 2017 to launch a weather balloon above the Great Plains during the solar eclipse. The balloon was launched after filing an FAA NOTAM and flew to an altitude of 114,700 feet and drifted over 60 miles. It was recovered within one mile of the planned landing site and delivered spectacular photos. The project was broadcast live on YouTube to over 90 classrooms in Oak Park Schools. Promoting STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) is a critical aspect of the team mission. The team was invited to host a table at the Wings Over Camarillo Air Show in August and taught young children to build model rockets while WWII airplanes soared overhead. OPHS Rocket Team is a regular participant in science nights at local elementary schools. For fun, the team will go ‘plane spotting’ at LAX for hours and hours. If it flies, the team is interested. Rockets, weather balloons, and drones are always part of the mission. Learning to manage a project is the primary learning objective. Planning, designing, scheduling, and safety are elements of successful project execution. These skills are not only critical in aerospace, but in other academic areas and in just about all aspects of life. The Oak Park Education Foundation is proud to annually fund and support the Oak Park Rocket and Aviation Team! To learn more, visit www.oakparkrocketry.org