NEW ORLEANS – For the students at Homer A. Plessy Community School in the French Quarter, watching the solar eclipse of 2017 was much more than just another school day.
Principal Meghan Raychaudhuri said the eclipse was an amazing opportunity that the faculty and staff just couldn’t pass up.
“As an arts integrated, project based school, we thought it was mission critical that our kids have the opportunity to come outside and view this event with their own eyes,” Raychaudhuri said.
To protect those eyes, each student had their own pair of NASA approved Eclipse Shades to wear.
The youngest students crafted extra protection to go around the edges of the Eclipse Shades out of paper plates, and plenty of teachers and staff members were on hand to remind students of the safety procedures as the excited children filled the school’s courtyard parking lot.
While some people had a hard time scrambling to find proper safety glasses for the big day, kindergarten teacher Kyle Radish said the school worked with the group Astronomers Without Borders to secure enough protective glasses.
“We have lessons, we have all kinds of things going on in the classrooms to help make this a meaningful part of our academic day,” Radish said. “This is what Homer Plessy is all about, what’s going on in our community and real life connections to learning things that are truly meaningful to our students.”
There’s no way to tell, Radish said, how many young minds experienced the first sparks of scientific curiosity while watching the eclipse.
“How many new scientists do we have being born right now, in this group?” she said.