Petty Officers 2nd Class Chris Gaddis and Genea Gierhahn talk to seventh-grade student Wally Reed at CBES about his science fair project.
For 23 years Colonial Beach Elementary School has been holding student science fairs and for most of those years Dahlgren judges have been a good part of them, according to Rondy Wright who heads the up the Kindergarten-through-7th grade science studies at CBES.
‘‘We’ve always relied upon Dahlgren for our judges,” said the 30-year veteran teacher. ‘‘They’ve always come through for us but this year our partnership produced a lot more of them.”
Indeed, as 31 volunteer judges helped the school.
They included: Petty Officers Genea Gierhahn, Chris Gaddis, Terry McClure (from the Aegis Training and Readiness Center); Josh Savage, Esco Corey and Brandy Parker (from the Branch Medical Clinic); Gilbert Thomas, Chris Washington, and Chief Petty Officer Kelly Walker (from Naval Support Activity South Potomac), as well as Navy civilian workers Gail Domaleski, Dr. Frank Mansfield, Rachael Morgan, Daniel Fredrickson, Tom Bourne, Ron Spaulding, Kalike Herrod, Barbara Anthony, Andrew Evans, Jeffrey Smith, Ken Conner, Sherri Wilkerson, Albert Parkinson, Karen McGuin, Richard Holcombe, Mike Looney, Stephanie Berry, Becky Wilson, Scott Lansdale and Frank Markham from Dahlgren’s six command centers.
The science fair produced 150 individual student exhibits in three divisions: Kindergarten through third grade; elementary grades 4 through 5; and middle school grades 6 and 7. Science projects were in the fields of microbiology, physics, zoology, environmental science, earth and space science, chemistry and botany.
‘‘We have winners in each category, Wright said, ‘‘but they will stop here. We used to go on to a region science fair and next year we hope to begin that competition again.”
Wright said that the science fair is done in part to satisfy Virginia’s stringent Standards of Learning mandate that was begun by the state’s educational oversight agency 15 years ago for middle grade students. Science fair SOLs are not required below the sixth grade level in schools but CBES students complied with projects nonetheless.
‘‘Our younger students seen to like the science fair competition,” Wright said. ‘‘We have a lot of entries even though they (K-5 students) are not required to do them.”
He also noted that, Colonial Beach being located on Monroe Bay, a lot of the exhibits dealt with water related projects.
‘‘There have generally been a lot of exhibits in the past dealing on the quality of drinking water...comparing Monroe Bay water to the city water and Potomac River, for instance,” he said. ‘‘But there weren’t that many this year.”
The winning project examined the negative correlation between fingerprints and intelligence of human beings.
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