Go Rafer MESA!

The MESA Club and elective class at Rafer Johnson Jr. High has been up to a lot lately. We sponsored a back-to-school dance as our main fundraiser for the year. Hard-working MESA students planned the dance, made posters and flyers, painted decorations, and set up for the dance. The dance theme was a pajama party (Pajammin' Dance), and students came dressed in their pajamas, ate snacks hung out with friends, and many students also participated in a pillow fight competition inside a bounce house! The dance raised over $1,500 for Rafer's MESA program.

Currently, we have been working on building bridges. Preparation for our bridges included taking Cornell notes on bridge design and forces acting on a bridge, as well as working on building spaghetti bridges. Students learned the two major scientific causes of bridge failure; compression and tension. We look forward to a visit from the CSU Fresno MESA staff next week, when our bridge specifications will be checked and they will be tested for strength. We will figure out which bridges will win the competition by plugging the numbers into a formula to find the strength-to-weight ratio.

We have also been working on getting all of our MESA students enrolled on line and signing up for our first Saturday Academy. It took awhile to get everybody signed up with the new system, but we were able to get a lot of help from Mr. Lopez, Ms. McCoy, and Ms. Prieto, and now we are happy to say that all of our elective students have completed their registration and are signed up for the first Saturday Academy. Most students are excited to pick their own workshops this year, and we look forward to seeing the MESA students from other schools, learning new things in workshops, and eating in the student union.

In the near future, Rafer MESA students will join together with MESA students from Kingsburg High School to participate in an astronomy field trip with Mr. Harness. Ten 8th graders from our class are also looking forward to the upcoming Catalina Island Marine Institute trip in November. We have submitted a t-shirt idea to a printer, and we will hopefully have our Rafer MESA t-shirts ready soon. Go, Rafer MESA!