WESTFIELD – Members of the Westfield School Committee are used to being presented with a wide array of proposals and presentations. If it can be presented in an academic sense, they’ve seen it all.
Well, almost all.
Monday evening’s meeting will include a presentation from students involved in the TRE (Teach, Re-teach, Enrich) program at South Middle School, who will be demonstrating two trebuchets – catapult-like structures that have been built in the school’s new wood shop this year.
“It’s a great opportunity to present exactly what the kids have built in the wood shop using math, physics and the technology piece and how they’ve brought it all together,” said South Principal Dennis Duquette, who explained the TRE program succinctly.
“For 90 minutes every lunch block, (students) spend 25 minutes eating lunch, and another 60 to 65 minutes in which we do interventions, remediation or acceleration,” he explained. “On the next day, we do enrichment, when we offer the kids a variety of coursework, from Wright Flight, inventions, poetry, building things in wood shop…”
The two structures have uprights of five and six feet, fire softballs, basketballs and soccer balls, and are just one example of the things being built in the shop. New wood shop instructor Dan Sheehan is quick to point out that helping TRE kids with the trebuchet, along with helping students build birdhouses in shop, has been great.
“This is one of those ideas that Dennis came up with for the TRE program,” said Sheehan of the lunchtime program. “Students who didn’t need academic help can come to programs teachers offer outside of their curriculum.”
Sheehan said that students make a list of the top three choices for a TRE activity.
“TRE has two sessions for each trimester, so I’ve had about 20 kids a week,” he added. “The most kids I’ve had have been about 40, with teams of 8 or 10.”
While these particular structures are relatively small, Sheehan said that down the road he’d like to make larger structures in the program.
“They have a six foot by two foot base, with uprights on both sides of about five or six feet and a throwing arm of about six or eight feet,” said Sheehan. “We threw a softball 135 feet, maybe? It’s hard to say because we’ve run out of tape measure. I’ll need to buy another 100-foot tape to find out what we’re doing here.”
The validity of the TRE program is something Sheehan hopes the School Committee sees through the demonstration Monday evening that the return of the woodshop at South has been a success.
“It’s a project students can learn so much from,” Sheehan said. “There’s the building part, but once you start getting measurements, you have the physics part, particularly when you gather data points. It’s an entry to physics, statistics, engineering.”
Sheehan said that there is a girl from one of her TRE groups who told him she wants to be an engineer and said she will be leading the presentation for the school committee.
“We’ve spent about $100 for materials for each of these trebuchets, and the kids have learned how to build them. They’ve done all the work themselves,” he continued. “I gave them parameters, but they made the decisions.”
