At the Fifteenth Annual Celebration of Achievement Banquet on Saturday, April 25, 2009, the South Florida Industry Partners For Education recognized Edward Batchelor with the 2008-2009 Palm Beach County Outstanding Angel Award for his outstanding SECME support at the High School level. Congratulations, Mr. Batchelor! Below is his letter of nomination:Reason for this award: Ed’s angelic assistance with the Seminole SECME program began in 2007 when he would just show up, entering the club’s classroom after school and assisting with the students. Like an angel, his presence at the meetings had a calming effect – both in offering adult supervision to one team submission, and in offering the harried school coordinator a chance to helped make progress and halt regressing. I asked him about it once, and he said he really liked that the school had a club with hands-on activites that applied math. Ed had worked with school’s former Physics teacher on a showcase project of science experimentation and engineering, and he wanted to keep doing that. He found that in SECME.
Delightfully, Ed’s participation involvement got his son involved. Eddie started attending because his father was there, but he rapidly choose SECME over marching band. By the spring, Eddie was on the brain bowl team for the Olympiad, so the brain bowl became a domain that Ed mentored the team of students. Eddie also competed beyond the Olympiad at the South Florida Science Museum’s engineering contest “Drop It, Build It, Fly It, Launch It.” Watching Eddie launch water bottle rockets independent of outside involvement really proved that his dad had engaged him in the SECME style.
Ed has been instrumental to the success of Seminole SECME. For example, it was Ed that helped the students with their technical drawings for Olympiad. The credit goes to him for his work that step by step turned student sketchs on looseleaf into scaled rough drafts, to finished submissions for the competition. At movie matinee fundraisers, Ed is the box office, collecting donations, distributing tickets, and supporting SECME. With water bottle rocketry, he brings real world experience. Ed talks to teenagers about his service in the Air Force, chasing down the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters. And that time he spends is more than just projectiles and parabolas, it’s career path advice for juniors and seniors to consider.
Ed is always planning big. He wants to work with the students after the Olympiad to build a Focault pendulum on the school’s campus by the media center. He has already helped plan a solar system scale model at starts at Seminole Ridge High and stretches across the entire school district. He has been of great help with the lesson planning for the proportions of the planets and the grant writing for the funding to realize this project.
To recap: Ed’s been invaluable asset this year, a guardian angel of the angles in science, engineering, communication and math at Seminole Ridge.
Kayleigh Previte
