PARIS — Oxford Hills Middle School officials say jump-starting a student’s desire to learn may be as simple as giving them a hands-on project.

So they created an Experiential Learning Team of teachers who created nontraditional ways to engage at-risk students in learning. They told some 33 students who signed up to go build a stock car that could be raced in the Oxford 250.

The two-year, self-sustaining project will be completed in 2013 when a NASCAR Sprint Cup driver – someone with name recognition of a Kyle Busch – will hopefully race it at Oxford Plains Speedway in Oxford. The car will then be sold and the funds used to start the process all over.

School officials say it’s the road to the 250 that is key as the students learn everything from how to build an engine to how to raise money for it.

“It’s really connecting the kids to school,” said project adviser Kyle Morey.

All the students are on two of four teams that include public relations, media/web design, finance and marketing, and engineering and building. They use math, science, engineering, literacy and teamwork to build the car, Morey said.

Each Thursday, members of the engineering and building team spend three hours at Crazy Horse Racing in Paris learning how to build a race car next to a half a dozen other race cars now under construction by professional builders.

The students will begin work on their own race car this spring.

The car has been named Aspire Higher, the slogan adopted years ago by the Oxford Hills School District for students who “dare to accept the challenge” of post secondary aspiration.

This is not a backyard project, said Mitch Green, who along with his wife, Judy, owns and operates one of New England’s premiere racing car shops, Race Basics, which operates Crazy Horse Racing.

“Let me tell you a story,” Morey said. One student missed many classes during the last school year before joining the race car team. This year he has not missed one day of school, even when he was late for the school bus one morning.

“He (the student) called the school to come and get him and the principal (Troy Eastman) went and got him,” Morey said.

Tammy Hadley of Waterford, mother of an eighth-grade student in the program, said it has helped her daughter tremendously by making her “step outside her comfort zone.”

The students  include seventh-grade student Anthony Whitman who went from telling his parents in 15 seconds what happened in school each day to talking for hours about what he did.

Some students have social, behavioral and attendance problems that make it difficult for them to succeed in the classroom. Morey said they have all shown improvement since since joining the project.

“My son was overwhelmed with writing and although he still likes to read and write, now he can really put it to use and see every day what he has accomplished,” Toby Whitman said of his son Anthony Whitman. “He went from a ho-hum student to a child who gets up extra early to get to school.”

Educators say attendance has improved by 370 hours this year compared to last; all of the students are earning A’s, B’s and C’s in their academic courses; and 90 percent of them have improved their academic assessments in math, writing and science.

It’s the type of hands-on education that Gov. Paul LePage came to see last week when he visited the students as they worked.

“It was pretty cool,” said Nik Parsons, a 14-year-old from Norway who hopes someday to work with his dad on cars.

Parsons said he had little interest in the classroom, but since the has become a member of the Aspire Higher race car team, his attitude toward education has soared.

“I work better,” he said.

Fellow classmate Ashley Enman, a seventh-grade student from Oxford, said she enjoys learning how to “bend the bars” to make the chassis. Although she aspires to be a photographer someday, she is learning about car transmissions and as part of the finance and marketing team, she is learning how to raise money and market the project.

Morey said the retail cost of the car is about $55,000, but with the help of Crazy Horse Racing, the team hopes to get a donated motor and body.

Morey said students involved in the finance and marketing team have written local area businesses in an attempt to raise $30,000 to fund the project. The students also wrote a successful grant application for $1,800 from a Maine Commission for Community Service and are awaiting word on another $3,500 state grant application.

Morey said the chassis and getting the body hung will cost about $2,000 if the body is sponsored by a business or businesses. The real cost will come with components such as the motor, transmission and wheels.

“It gets really expensive,” he said. This year they will have the chassis built and the body hung, with the rest of the work happening next year.

“If you can apply learning to real life situations, people retain it better,” Morey said.

For more information see the student’s website at http://racingtoexcel.weebly.com/

ldixon@sunjournal.com

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