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Monday, February 16, 1998 By Brian O'Neill
It's some kind of teen nightmare. You're on a sleep-over with friends, and sometime during the night, there's talk of gas escaping.
Everyone else evacuates to another part of the basement.
In what is perhaps a departure from your own teen experiences, however, this particular gas is odorless and crucial to a classroom exercise.
What we had in the basement of St. Bonaventure School in Shaler was an emergency only an android could handle, so Abby Loughrey went into action to save the crew.
St. Bonaventure, a Catholic elementary school of nearly 500 students, has been sending small crews of seventh- and eighth-graders into "space" since 1991.
The hull of their ship is plywood, strategically placed around the boys' and girls' bathrooms in the school basement. The crew remains inside for 47 hours, in contact through headphones and closed-circuit TV with a student-run mission control on the other side of the wall.
A crowd of about 150 children and adults was on hand late last Thursday afternoon for the liftoff, which sent "smoke" from dry ice flying 50 feet out the tailpipes, which in turn had second-grade boys pronouncing, "Awesome."
Sean Cannon, whose daughter, Caitlin, was among the crew of seven students and one teacher, said after liftoff, "The four words that nobody wants to hear? Sister, we have a problem."
The seriousness of these students was clear the next morning, however, when public relations officer Meagan Minnaugh, a seventh-grader, briefed me on the previous night's crisis.
Sometime after 9:30 Thursday night, there was a lethal gas attack. Red alert. Everyone but Loughrey fled to a secure pod. She was playing the part of Lt. Commander Data, an android straight from "Star Trek," immune to the gas. Her job: find the leak or see the ship destroyed.
Teacher Bob Cray said this was no joke. If the leak wasn't found, the mission would end. These space explorers would have to go upstairs, call their parents, and ask to get picked up before "ER" was even over.
Even an android would feel the pressure. I still remember dropping the baton in a fourth-grade relay race, leading to the customary afternoon of torture by my best friends. A slip-up here could trail a kid to graduation.
"Hey, Abby, thanks again for blowing us up in space."
Loughrey came through, though. She told me through headphones that she'd been nervous, but she had the crew behind her, and she calmed when she remembered this was designed to be fun.
Her mother, Nancy, who'd come by the school to drop off her fourth-grader's lunch, said her laid-back oldest child was a good choice for this job.
"She's not one to spaz," Mrs. Loughrey said.
Learning not to spaz is not the way the principal, Sister John Ann Mulhern, put it, but she meant the same when she said this exercise "helps the children grow in independence and responsibility, and makes them aware of the gifts God has given them."
So while nobody's ready to canonize Capt. Kirk or Mr. Spock, what mother wouldn't want to make this complaint, and this complaint only, about her child's pastime?
"Every time I go over there," Marianne Del Pizzo said of daughter Dina, crew commander, "she's either on a red alert or they're busy."
Lots of parents complain that their children are just taking up space, but only in Shaler do they say it with pride.
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