Jul. 14—TUKWILA — Doing well on a final project will get you an "A" at most schools. But at Raisbeck Aviation High School, a few students a year get an all-access "dream day" at the airport.
That's thanks to the Environmental Challenge Project, an annual competition at the school in collaboration with the Port of Seattle. The project challenges these budding engineers and pilots at one of the area's top-performing high schools. Each year, Port officials ask teens to present their most innovative solutions for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport's environmental challenges.
The winning team gets to look at whatever airport innards they want to see — the air traffic control tower, the morgue or even the room where the Transportation Security Administration places its confiscated items.
This year's assignment: Propose an environmentally sustainable plan to expand or replace the airport's cellphone waiting lot.
Students were given five possible sites for a lot and a little bit of instruction on the pros and cons of each location. Some suggested lavish, multistory parking garages that would cost millions. One team brought in a physical model of its proposal showing a way to keep the lot where it is. Another group suggested placing the lot in the airport's existing parking lot, which was not one of the options, but it impressed airport employees nonetheless.
"This was definitely the hardest project of the year," said Jude Dooley, a rising senior at Raisbeck.
That's by design. The airport project serves as the students' capstone for junior year and involves all their core subjects.
When school mimics work
Founded in 2007, this Highline school district school enrolls 400 students, 70% of whom are kids of color. Test scores outpace those at most public high schools in the Seattle area, and many graduates go on to careers in aviation and engineering. Some have returned to the school as visiting mentors.
To win the behind-the-scenes tour of the airport, students must deal with the same bureaucratic hurdles that Port employees face when making a proposal. Each four-person team acts like a mini consulting group, even coming up with a fictional company name. Teams must perform financial, traffic, environmental and legal analyses to back up their ideas.
The winning team this year — calling itself "EcoLot" — proposed expanding the current cellphone lot to accommodate more cars, and placing a new lot near Lora Lake, just outside the airport. Some features of that lot would include a "pavement and filtration system for stormwater runoff" and digital signs to indicate parking availability.
Port of Seattle employees want to be clear: The cellphone lot is not scheduled for immediate replacement. Sea-Tac made some improvements to the lot a few years ago to help with heavy congestion. It will be relocated eventually as part of a new airport master plan that would widen the airfield and convert the current lot to a new roadway.
The prompt usually asks students to focus on problems that are fictitious or far into the future to avoid public speculation. The King County Regional Airport does a similar exercise with students.
But sometimes the students' presentations do inform real life. Some of the airport signs that explain recycling were influenced by previous student presentations, said Steve Rybolt, the senior environmental program manager at Sea-Tac.
And students take the project seriously, even though most of them, when asked before their final presentations, weren't sure what the prize would be for winning.
The final presentation day was during the last week of June. Students arrived at the building, located next to the Museum of Flight and Boeing Field, dressed in business attire.
Eleanor Hoffman, who dreams of being a NASA engineer, stood in front of a panel of five judges to introduce her team, which included Dooley. Called Vanguard Engineering Solutions, Hoffman and her team of teenage consultants proposed that the airport create a new lot on the site of a retired stormwater facility.
This option is the most environmentally friendly because the area had already been developed, Vanguard team members explained. It is also next to the Angle Lake light rail station, so if the lot fills up, drivers can park at the station. Arriving travelers could also hop on the light rail station at the airport and get off at that stop to meet their ride. The bathrooms would use recycled water.
The team estimated its proposal would cost about $19,000 to $30,000 per parking space, or around $10 million to $16 million total.
"How did you come up with the price for building one parking spot?" asked one of the judges.
"I wasn't sure of the exact pricing. I had to come up with a few sources and make an average from that," Vanguard member Ethan Shanklin replied.
Learning about aviation jobs beyond "pilot"
The Environmental Challenge Project first kicked off during Raisbeck's inaugural school year, 2007-08. A group of pilots, engineers and Port employees got together and discussed what high schoolers needed to know, Rybolt said. The project evolved from that discussion.
The goal is for students to get exposed to careers beyond those more commonly associated with aviation, such as engineers and pilots.
"Our hope is we can give them an experience in the working world," said Rybolt.
Even the parameters of the competition — like the five sites students were asked to consider — were created with learning in mind.
"We had someone from transportation and landslide to talk about flow of traffic, someone from government relations speak about different jurisdictions of the airport, and had someone from the planning department to speak about capital development," said Adele Pozzuto, a senior environment management specialist for the airport who managed this year's Environmental Challenge Project. "I spoke about environmental compliance."
Rybolt can't recall if any graduates of Raisbeck ever went on to work on a problem they researched for the Port as a student. But one graduate did eventually become a planner for Island County, doing similar analyses to what this project demands.
Unlike many of his classmates, Dooley said he isn't sure he wants to go into aviation. He's interested in exploring something related to finance. But he said opportunities like this are what makes the school enjoyable.
"It's a really good experience for whatever field you go into," he said.
___
(c)2024 The Seattle Times
Visit The Seattle Times at www.seattletimes.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
