Sally Ride Elementary all set for stellar year
It, 10 other more new Orange schools open
Eager to encourage her daughters to study science, Sarah Boye enrolled them in an Orange County elementary school with an aviation and aerospace magnet program.
They visited the Kennedy Space Center. They read about astronauts.
So when the school district decided to merge the school with another, build a new campus and then seek a new name for the facility, 9-year-old Vala Boye’s suggestion was hardly surprising. Call the new school Sally Ride Elementary School in honor of the first American woman in space, the then-third grader said.
The name, along with other suggestions, was put to a vote, with parents, students and staff at both schools weighing in. It emerged the winner, and the Orange County School Board approved the moniker in April.
The new Sally Ride Elementary School will open for classes today, when the school district kicks off the 2018-19 school year. Forty-five other Florida school districts, including those in Lake and Osceola counties, also start school today.
“We were so excited. We were just jumping up and
down,” Boye said. “Sally Ride was an inspiration.”
The family was excited earlier this month, too, when they got a tour of the new school, which offered a sneak peak to the community ahead of its official opening.
The school sits in Orange’s Taft community and will house the space-focused magnet program that had been at Durrance Elementary School. The new school is on the property of what was Cypress Park Elementary.
The district merged the two small, old schools — one opened in 1959 and the other in 1960 — and demolished most of what had been Cypress Park, building new facilities in its place. The nearly $22 million project also includes renovating the two older buildings that remain.
The new Sally Ride is one of 11 new facilities the Orange school district is opening this school year, when it expects to welcome about 209,000 students onto its campuses. The 11 projects were all paid for by a local sales tax that Orange voters first approved in 2002 and reauthorized in 2014.
“Thanks to you and the taxpayers, OCPS is able to build a beautiful school,” said Sally Ride principal Raquel Flores as she welcomed parents and students to the “sneak peek” event. “We’re going to make Sally Ride an awesome school.”
The other new or renovated schools include two kindergarten-to-eighthgrade schools — Audubon Park School and Lake Como School — that were built on the sites of former elementary schools but will now house middle school students, too.
Eight other old elementary schools also will debut new campuses.
The new Sally Ride school houses a few space displays that had been at Durrance, including a dashboard from a flight simulator that sits in the media center, and a statute of an astronaut that stands in the lobby. The school will have a STEM lab for lessons in science, technology, engineering and math.
Ride, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, would’ve liked that a school with a science focus was named in her honor, said Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner for 27 years and the co-founder of Sally Ride Science, a foundation dedicated to encouraging youngsters, particularly girls, to pursue careers in the field.
When Ride flew on the space shuttle Challenger in June 1983, she was not only the first American woman but, at 32, the youngest American in space. After her retirement from NASA, she served as a physics professor at the University of California San Diego, and worked with the foundation.
“She was involved in education and science education the rest of her life,” O’Shaughnessy said.
The foundation works to inspire students and boost teacher training in a field in which the United States still lags. “American boys and girls just don’t do as well in math and science as boys and girls in other countries,” she added.
Two others schools — one in California and one in Maryland — also are named for the former astronaut, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Boye, who has three daughters, said she was among the Durrance parents initially upset that the school was closing, as she appreciated the everyone-knows-you feeling on the small campus. She even wondered if she should move her two school-age girls back to the school in their neighborhood.
But now she is happy with the new Sally Ride campus, that many of their favorite Durrance teachers will be working at the new school, and that the focus on STEM lessons will continue.
“Well,” she thought, “how can we not go?”