Longtime Kirksville principal, teacher got to bring NASA training to her lessons
Forty years ago, the U.S. Space Shuttle Challenger burst into flames shortly after liftoff.
All seven crew members died, including Christa McAuliffe, a teacher who was planning to present her students a televised lesson from space.
In the aftermath, fearing a pending shortage of scientists, NASA created a program to work with science teachers on how to instruct and inspire future astronauts.
Janie Theobald was invited to be a part of that.
“They chose people from all over the country,” said Mrs. Theobald, who for many years was the principal and junior high school science teacher at Mary Immaculate School in Kirksville.
“It was one of those things,” she said. “We didn’t know how we were chosen. No one ever told us.”
She and 24 other junior high and high school science teachers spent the summer of 1988 at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
They toured the facilities, became acquainted with the personnel and the missions they were working on, and got a close-up view of the giant space shuttle rocket boosters.
“You have no idea how massive those things and all the parts that go into them are until you come nose-to-nose with a nosecone,” said Mrs. Theobald.
Their mentor was Konrad Dannenberg, a longtime NASA engineer and member of the German rocket team that developed the Saturn V-b rockets that transported men to the moon.
“He talked about all the different aspects of it,” she recalled. “We had to learn from the bottom up how the things are made.”
They received more technical information than any junior high science teacher could ever ask for.
The weather was brutally hot.
“They were doing static test flights, and the rocket fumes would linger in the valley,” Mrs. Theobald recalled.
After going through all the labs, the science teachers started training, with the understanding that one of them might eventually get to be part of another space shuttle crew.
“We trained in our space suits in a huge, neutral-buoyancy tank,” Mrs. Theobald recalled.
They also underwent G-force training and other rigors that are part of preparing astronauts for space flight.
And there were celebrities.
“Every time one of the real astronauts would come on post, we were like little kids,” said Mrs. Theobald. “We would all run to the window to see them.”
One giant leap
One of the participating science teachers’ most important tasks was to create educational resources and activities.
“We had to do action plans and then teach them to our fellow students and also the project engineers,” she recalled.
Each lesson revolved around a simple concept, such as battery packs or magnets or propulsion, “all in terms of math and science.”
“And we all sat down and brainstormed lesson plans for junior high all the way through high school, using the same concepts,” she said.
The core of those lesson plans remains widely in use today.
For the following three years, each teacher spent time visiting schools all around them, bringing science and space to the students.
“They would send up all kinds of different models for teaching,” Mrs. Theobald recalled. “I had rocks from the Moon stored at my house for a while.”
When the National Science Teacher Association had its national convention in St. Louis, “there I was in my spacesuit, in the middle of the Convention Center, handing out information,” she said. “It was great!”
Many hands
Mrs. Theobald’s fellow Mary Immaculate parishioners stepped up to make her astronomical summer possible.
“I had three young children at the time and was away for three whole months,” she said. “People had to shuffle my kids between swimming and golf lessons and all the other things kids do over the summer. The families were wonderful about that.”
Shortly before heading to Alabama, she crossed paths with two junior high students on bicycles.
“They came over and were obviously very upset that I was leaving,” she recalled. “The whole thing about Christa McAulffe scared them to death.
“I was really taken aback that these seventh-grade boys didn’t want me to do something this exciting,” she said. “I really had to reflect on that.”
She assured them that even if she were to go into space, it would be statistically safer than driving on a nearby highway.
“I explained to them that throughout the history of exploration, if bad things happened, people learned from what happened, reflected on it and then continued on,” she said.
Adair to dream
Mrs. Theobald and her husband, Dr. Bob Theobald, moved to Kirksville from Pennsylvania in 1976.
They had two young children. Another was born shortly after they settled in Missouri.
Mrs. Theobald believes landing in Kirksville was a Godsend.
“Everybody was Catholic where I came from,” she noted. “Here, I’ve had to search my faith, challenge my faith, stretch my faith and ultimately grow in my faith.”
Dr. Theobald was teaching medicine at the A.T. Still University in Kirksville. Mrs. Theobald was home taking care of the children.
One Friday, the pastor of Mary Immaculate Parish called Mrs. Theobald to say Mary Immaculate School had lost a junior high science teacher and needed her to step in.
She told him that although she was certified for kindergarten through 12th grade, “I only teach high school.”
The priest insisted: “We really need you. I’ve already hired a babysitter for you.”
Mrs. Theobald went to work the following Monday.
“And on many, many days after that, I blessed him profusely or muttered things under my breath, depending on the day,” she said.
A few years later, the school’s principal abruptly resigned.
Mrs. Theobald’s colleagues tried unsuccessfully to convince her to step into the role.
The pastor who had hired her, who by then had been transferred to another parish, drove up and told her, “Stop being a jackass. You know what you have to do.”
“That’s how I became principal for 30 years,” she said.
The final frontier
Everyone in Mrs. Theobald’s family made sacrifices for her to serve the parish and the school with distinction.
She never got to head into space, but the training afforded her plenty of other opportunities.
“It was a wonderful ride,” she said. “I met incredible people. I think I got to inspire a lot of kids to look into science.”
As part of her follow-up work with NASA, she spent several weeks with fellow science teachers and a group of Russian cosmonauts at the University of Boston working on a program called “New Frontiers in Space.”
She got to visit over lunch with a cosmonaut who had spent time aboard the former Soviet MIR space station.
He told her how while orbiting the earth for all those days, he came to appreciate how much he loved his family.
Likewise, while looking down at earth from space, he realized that he could see no geopolitical boundaries.
He told her: “With everything going on in the world, there has to be something holding us all together.”
She asked if he was talking about God.
“Call it God, or a Supreme Power,” he replied. “But I’m talking about something with the power to hold us all together.”
Formation community
Each year, Mrs. Theobald consistently fielded and mentored a dedicated and successful Science Olympiad team at Mary Immaculate.
Many of her students went on to study physics, engineering and chemistry.
Her heartbeat synched with the rhythm of Catholic education. Not only was she a full-time teacher and principal, she also served for 30 years as secretary of the Missouri Nonpublic School Accrediting Association (MNSAA).
“I went to a meeting to cover for someone, and ended up staying for 30 years, even after I retired,” she said.
She helped write the self-study program that all Catholic schools in this diocese use to evaluate themselves every five years.
With the MNSAA, she helped assess the action plans for every nonpublic school in the state and helped articulate the 10 standards that are used for accrediting nonpublic schools.
Back home, she worked for years to help the people of Mary Immaculate Parish embrace their special role as a formation community.
“With the university and the medical school and the dental school, people tend to come and go here,” she noted.
The ties don’t go back as many generations as they do in some other Catholic schools in the diocese, “but we’re making great parishioners, wherever they land,” she said.
God in the details
Mrs. Theobald retired from Mary Immaculate School in 2009.
Three current teachers at the school are her former students.
It pleases her still to hear teachers at Kirksville High School talk about how Mary Immaculate graduates stand out.
“You’ve heard the phrase, ‘the devil’s in the details?’” she asked. “Well, God is in the details here, and it makes all the difference in the world.”
“Discipline matters,” she said. “Rigor matters. Social justice matters. Volunteerism matters. God matters. A faith-centered environment matters. Catholic schools give you all of that.”
