Chemistry Lab in Van Carries Sophisticated Science to 25 Rural Schools : Education: Program funded in Pennsylvania offers students a chance to use expensive equipment. Teachers are also trained in the newest techniques.

HUNTINGDON, Pa. —  Tom Spicher views himself as an itinerate teacher who provides the type of classroom support he always wanted when he taught chemistry in the public schools.

Each weekday morning, he rises as the sun starts to peak over the nearby mountains and loads Juniata College’s big white van with nuclear scalers, IR spectrophotometers, analytical balances, gas chromatographers and other instruments.

At a time when American students are lagging far behind those of other developed countries, Spicher’s chemistry van makes the rounds to about 25 high schools in rural Pennsylvania, schools that otherwise wouldn’t have access to such sophisticated and expensive equipment for their science labs.

“I like the van. It brings in all these wonderful things to play with,” says Eric Ervin, 16, of Hollidaysburg, waving his hand toward the instruments that had been carried from the van to the chemistry laboratory.

The equipment is a far cry from the old, temperamental PH meter that Hollidaysburg High School chemistry teacher Eleanor Siegrist struggled with for years. “It worked if I was lucky,” she says. “I had to trouble-shoot it, soak it and baby it.”

Now, the chemistry van brings enough equipment for the whole class to participate in experiments. Students use PH meters to test the acidity of drain cleaners and juices, a High Performance Liquid Chromatographer to determine caffeine content in drinks and a spectrophotometer to analyze pollutants in aerosol cans.

The concept is to provide the equipment and teacher training necessary to improve high school chemistry education in six primarily rural central Pennsylvania counties.

The words painted on the van put it succinctly: “Chemistry in Motion.”

“The students get to work with equipment that normally they wouldn’t work with,” says Anthony Obarsky, a chemistry teacher at Bishop Guilfoyle High School in Altoona.

Spicher logs about 300 miles per week, steering down winding back roads to make monthly visits to the high schools that have student bodies as small as about 100 and as large as about 1,000. Each is within a 50-mile radius of Juniata College, which began the chemistry van program in the fall of 1988.

Two church schools--one Mennonite and the other Catholic--also participate in the program.

On a recent day, Spicher drove the van, adorned with a wizard surrounded by colorful clouds of scientific terms, up to Juniata Valley High School in Alexandria.

Twelve pupils in Edward McLaughlin’s 11th-grade chemistry class used several gas chromatographers, valued at $5,000 apiece, to check propellants in aerosol cans. The government banned fluorocarbons in the 1970s and the students were curious to know whether manufacturers were abiding by the standards.

Spicher, throwing on a white lab coat and goggles, joined McLaughlin for a brief explanation of the project and then walked around the class answering questions and prompting students to identify gases as charted on a graph.

Students can display their science projects at a spring science fair, another key part of the Juniata program.

The chemistry van has become the heart of the program. Jan Hildenbrandt at State College Area High School and Guy Anderson of Bald Eagle Area High School in Wingate provided the impetus for the idea in 1984, when they sought to create a support network for science and chemistry teachers who find themselves isolated in rural areas.

Although science has changed drastically in the last 25 to 30 years, the teaching of high school chemistry has remained essentially unchanged, especially in small, rural school districts, says Donald J. Mitchell, a Juniata chemistry professor who is project director.

Rural schools usually have only one chemistry teacher who is responsible for several science preparations--sometimes different in both grade level and discipline and often with all the instruction occurring in the same room. Budgets are tight so there is little money for equipment, Mitchell says.

The local chemistry teachers, led by Hildenbrandt and Anderson, joined in a partnership with college professors and formed the Central Pennsylvania Assn. of Chemistry Teachers. Meetings are held four times a year, including summer workshops when teachers learn how to work the equipment and develop experiments.

The National Science Teachers Assn. says a third of U.S. high schools offer no physics course, and many others offer no chemistry course. In a recent survey of 13 countries, U.S. high school seniors ranked ninth in advanced physics, 11th in advanced chemistry and dead last in advanced biology.

Only 42% of 13-year-old U.S. students could successfully analyze experiments, compared to 72% of the South Korean students. Singapore ranks first in 12th-grade biology, while America is last among 13 countries. Less than 1% of U.S. students take physics and chemistry, while up to 25% of 18-year-olds in Canada and Norway take the two subjects for two years each.

Japan and South Korea tied for first in general science for 10-year-olds, while America ranked eighth.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress said in a September, 1988, report that teachers reported spending only an average of 18 minutes per day on science in grades kindergarten through third grade, and only about 29 minutes per day at grades four through six. Even for those students who are enrolled in science classes at the high school level, the amount of time actually spent on science learning appears to be minimal, officials say.

The National Science Foundation predicts a shortage of as many as 675,000 scientists and engineers by the year 2006.

“If you want systemic type of change in what’s happening in high school chemistry, you need a very continuous type of input and activities,” Mitchell says. “The goal that I had was to try to have high school chemistry reflect what scientists do.”

Siegrist, the chemistry teacher at Hollidaysburg High School, says her students are sold on the program.

“It really gives us a broader range of experiments that we can do,” says Jennifer Brennan, 15, who wants to major in science in college.

Spicher is quick to emphasize that “this is not a traveling road show. I try not to upstage the teacher. There are some teachers who feel comfortable with sitting back and letting me conduct the class. Others want me to work alongside them. Some just want me to drop off the equipment and pick it up at the end of the week.”

The project is funded with a five-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation grant. An additional $300,000 comes from the foundations of firms such as Dow Chemical, Du Pont, Heinz and Merck.

“I probably have not spent as much on equipment in my 27 years teaching as Spicher has on the van right now,” says Garey Sprowl, who teaches physical science, academic biology and chemistry at Forbes Road High School in Waterfall, a school with 240 students in grades seven through 12.

“I graduated from college in 1964 and most of the equipment that we’re using I was never trained in,” Sprowl says. “Part of this program is retraining some of us in the use of the higher tech equipment.”

Peter J. Ludwig, principal of Juniata Valley High School in Alexandria, says the program lifted teacher Edward McLaughlin “out of a rut and got him into the mainstream of changing his outlook in everything. He’s a different teacher today.”

McLaughlin has become one of the main summer workshop leaders at Juniata College.

Mitchell and other Juniata College officials are working to expand the program to a strip of 20 high schools along the so-called Mon-Valley, about 10 miles south of Pittsburgh. Officials want to purchase a second van that would be stationed and operated from a chemical company.

Also, Juniata is working to expand the present van to include biology. Officials hope to get a second grant from the National Science Foundation by the 1991-92 academic year.

Juniata officials have worked with Purdue University in offering advice for a similar program at West LaFayette, Ind. Eli Lilly Foundation recently awarded a $120,000 grant to the effort that Harry A. Morrison, head of Purdue’s Department of Chemistry, said is part of a larger effort to help teachers improve science and education throughout the K-12 grades.

Mitchell is convinced that the program has been successful because “we just listen to the high school teachers. Everything came from them. We didn’t say, ‘You need to do this. You need to do that.’ ”

“The commonality. The van. The interaction in the summer. It’s just all good chemistry,” McLaughlin says.