Wyandotte Kids Have the Whole World in Their Hands

Most middle school students are not big fans of word problems, but those at have a new one to appreciate.

Take one donated steel globe, add a number of materials and service hours contributed by several businesses and organizations and multiply by the school pride of more than 100 students and staff members.

The answer? A revamped garden area complete with a to-scale globe, a new walkway and an enhanced butterfly garden that thousands of students in coming years will be able to enjoy.

The project, known around school as Globe 2011, was the brainchild of Michael White, a science teacher at Wilson Middle School and the staff advisor of the school’s Warrior Science Club. But even though White put in countless hours on the project, he is quick to defer the credit for its completion to the students and other staff members around Wilson.

“This was completely kid-driven by the members of the science club and the other groups who helped,” White said.

The project started in the fall when a steel globe was donated to the school to be added to the garden area. Painted light green and showing a lot of rust, White said he was glad to have it. Just not as it was.

In January, members of the science club started getting the globe ready for its transformation.

The globe measures 16 feet in diameter, so after determining the correct proportion, students used Google images to create paper templates of all of the continents. Those templates and the globe were then sent to , where students in Glen Meisel’s advanced machine trades class replicated the paper templates out of steel, then welded the cutout continents to the globe.

The globe returned to Wilson at the beginning of March, where students returned to sanding, priming and painting–all of which had to be done while battling the elements.

“The globe is too big to bring inside, so we had to do everything outside,” White said. “I’m telling you, though, the kids really stepped up.”

As the weather eventually turned warmer, the next phase of the project got under way. Students designed a new walkway through the garden area, complete with a raised pedestal on which the globe can stand. Not only did the students design the area, but they also did all of the measuring, staking and marking for the project.

As the scope of the project got bigger, so did the number of groups at Wilson that got involved. Soon, students from the Builder’s Club, the Student Council, the For A Better Environment (FACE) Club, the Foreign Language Club and the boys’ and girls’ track teams got involved to clear away dirt and grass and get the area ready for new cement.

When that work was complete, White and Keith Loya, a special education teacher at Wilson, volunteered a day over the Labor Day weekend to install the forms for the walkway and pedestal.

The cement was poured June 1, thanks to the help of five members of Roosevelt’s varsity football team who showed up to cart wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of cement from the truck to the job site. The cement was donated by McCoig Materials in Detroit and the finishing was done with the help of Wyandotte’s Robert Jagiello and Joseph Deichelbohrer.

“I was told that, between the cement and the finishing, that was about a $4,500 project that was given to us for free,” White said. “We wouldn’t have been able to do this without that help.”

The finishing touches–some touch-up painting and last-minute landscaping–were done last week in preparation for the school's annual memory dinner for Wilson’s eighth-grade students.

Many of the students and staff who worked on the project sported bright green shirts with the picture of a globe and the phrase “Working today for a better tomorrow” emblazoned on them. Those shirts, a sense of pride for those who helped complete Globe 2011, were donated by Applewood Nursing Center in Woodhaven.