KAILUA-KONA — What makes America great?
West side students offered their insights on that very question for the annual Voice of Democracy contest, sponsored by Veterans of Foreign Wars Post/Auxiliary 12122.
All of this year’s winners are from Makua Lani Christian Academy High School.
Kulani Cambell earned first place, Makayla Abril-Butlers finished in second place, while Josiah Richards and Tia Lubiecki earned participant recognition.
Awards are $125 for first place, $100 second place, and $50 to the two participants.
Cambell will go onto the state competition in Honolulu where the awards are $500 for first place, $400 for second place and $300 third place.
Besides the money, the first-place winner of the state award gets an all expense trip to Washington, DC where they will live with other winners from across the country as they vie for the national award, which earns between $10,000 to $30,000.
Herrmann selected
as top teacher
Mr. Frederick Herrmann was selected by the VFW/Auxiliary 12122 for the Citizenship Teachers award last week.
Herrmann has been a teacher at Makua Lani for nine years and has excelled in teaching English, AP language and literary composition, calculus, and history-AP European departments along with the fine arts of music, film and photography.
He volunteers at Saint Michael’s Church, the Pregnancy Center of Kona and completed a mission trip to Japan against human trafficking.
He has collaborated in the community, locally with many scientists, teachers, the “Moon Base Program” and the University of Hilo (NASA) in order to gift the space club students with the opportunity to enhance their ideas and propel their innovative projects.
In 2017, he facilitated with seven students within the Space Club team to create “Errantes Vitam” a sustainable orbital settlement for which they received first prize in the NASA competition. He has utilized resources from science, ballistics, psychology, geology, mathematics, music, operations, and architecture in order to help the 2018-2019 Space Club students complete their project “Corpus,” a self-sustaining orbital human habitat. This project brought impressive, exciting results as these 11 students were awarded Grand Prize winners, Aerospace Meridian at the International Space Development Conference in Washington, D.C.
It is clear that Mr. Herrmann constantly gives of himself to help other reach their goals. He represents and models a champion teacher. He gives of his time to the students, parents, teachers and community members in order to support the vision of every day success. His leadership as a teacher, his dedication to teaching and his passion for space only skim the surface of what he does every day.
