Photos: Space shuttle toilet, UFO and Stealth fighter displays delight REACH Academy students

Tuesday was not a normal day at REACH Academy in East Oakland.

In the school’s front office students chanted, “Faster, faster!” as a classmate was repeatedly spun upside-down on a Multiple Axis Simulator by Ivor Dawson of the Traveling Space Museum.

“Had enough?” Dawson asked his dizzy victim.

Out in a drenched schoolyard, rain wasn’t the only thing falling from the sky.

A UFO had landed.

Fourth-graders crawled inside the 6-foot-diameter flying saucer looking for extraterrestrials. Across the schoolyard, third-graders explored a full-scale Lunar Roving Vehicle, pretending to be moon explorers.

It was Space Day 2023 at REACH, and all 400 students of the K-5 school were budding scientists and astronauts.

“Our scholars can be the next astrophysicists,” says Natasha Flint-Moore, the school’s principal. “Our scholars can be the next boy or girl to land on the moon or work for NASA.”

Flint-Moore started the program before the pandemic, inviting Dawson’s Los Angeles-based Traveling Space Museum to visit the school in an underserved area of East Oakland. After the program was paused for two years thanks to COVID, this year she partnered with the National Aeronautical Space Administration (NASA) and Oakland’s own Chabot Space and Science Center to transform REACH into an “interactive space station” with 15 different exhibits.

In addition to exploring the axis simulator, the UFO and the lunar module, students had a chance to climb inside space suits, sit in the seat of a mock-up F-117 Stealth jet fighter or explore the universe in a pop-up mini-planetarium.

“We’re just really trying to level the playing field here,” Flint-Moore said. “We’re changing the narrative coming out of East Oakland. There’s so much violence that’s reported, and we’re trying to increase access to science, technology, engineering and math. We have brilliant scholars.”

Nobody seemed to enjoy the day more than Flint-Moore.

“Hey, did you see the space toilet display yet? Come on, let’s go!” she said before dashing off, breaking her own cardinal rule about no running in the hallway.