Fountain Lake EAST program focused on community service
FOUNTAIN LAKE — Fountain Lake High School’s Education Accelerated by Service and Technology program is looking beyond the school’s campus in order to contribute their uniquely suited tools and talents to the community.
“Part of being in high school is we have free time and we’re supposed to help the community. So it’s something that we definitely should be doing,” second-year EAST student Christopher Desfassiaux said.
The year 2000 marked the beginning of the program at Fountain Lake. Now, the school’s EAST program has around 90 students in grades 9-12 involved in it in six class periods per school day, EAST facilitator Devry Rhodes said.
Though the program is mostly student-led, Rhodes said he searched the city of Hot Springs’ website for community service project ideas and sent about 30 emails to potential service recipients.
Rhodes said County Judge Darryl Mahoney responded, requesting the Garland County Court House be measured and modeled in 3-D, as well as measurements of the post oak tree on the courthouse lawn. He said students in the program were “more than eager to do it.”
“I thought as detailed as the courthouse is, that it might be a good challenge for them,” Mahoney said.
Desfassiaux and four-year EAST student Andrew Overton took the helm on the projects. With assistance from other students, the team is creating separate three-dimensional renderings of the courthouse using two different types of imaging software.
Measurements are currently being gathered using laser measurers, and Desfassiaux estimated the process will take “several more weeks” to complete.
“We’re still in the early stages for sure. We’ve gone through and measured most of the hall
ways and the outdoors, and we’re trying to obviously make it as detailed possible,” he said.
“You have to write every little thing down, and that takes a while,” Overton said.
Overton helped measure the post oak tree on the courthouse lawn, which came to 94 feet tall, with a trunk that is 13.6 feet in circumference, and a canopy span, also called a crown, that measures 83.4 feet.
He said a simple method included a formula involving using the length of his arm and the distance to the tree to get the height.
“They provide a service that obviously no one else in Garland County provides with the 3-D aspect of it,” Mahoney said. “It’s also unique because the students are gaining from it at the same time. It’s a win-win for everyone in the county. We got some information that we wanted and needed, and they got some skills.”
Several other projects conducted by the program include mapping 13 of the hiking trails in Hot Springs Village, creating 3-D printed models of all of the buildings in the Fountain Lake School District and designing a logo for the school.
“A lot of them work really hard,” Rhodes said.
Looking to the future, Rhodes hopes to be able to create a 50th-anniversary video for the Hot Springs Village community. Desfassiaux said the program is “trying to do a children’s book type thing,” based on wildlife conservation to “raise awareness toward extinct animals.”
“The goal is to definitely help the community, but with the technology that we have here at the school that you don’t as easily get everywhere else or that would cost money,” he said.