The life of Science Olympiad’s budding class came full circle, but not in the best way.

With education a target of Kansas budget cuts, Honors Science Investigations, a class a number of students took last year, was one of the classes taken off the Manhattan High schedule.

“It was real disappointing because it worked so well for us,” coach Pat Lamb said. “They keep cutting money from education and they’ve got to know: it’s hurting people. [Our students] are some of the people who got hurt. The cuts took away something that was a real strong academic pursuit, but we had to make cuts and that was one of the casualties of them voting not to give money to education. It drives me crazy.”

For the one year of its existence, the class brought Science Olympiad members together to study with their team and their coaches.

“The class was so helpful and gave each of us an opportunity to study something we really love. It should have been one of the last classes to be cut,” senior Rebekah Hennesy said.

When Hennesy found out the class would be cut, she immediately signed up for an hour of study hall for some extra time to work on her events.

“I do worry that the quality of studying will go down as I won’t necessarily have access to my partners and coaches,” Hennesy said. “I’m hoping that it won’t affect the team too much because we’ll try to meet more outside of class. [Getting to Nationals] would be such a great closing chapter to my three years with the Science Olympiad team. Nationals would fall the day before graduation and it would be not only a great way to end with my team, but also a great way to end my high school career.”

The team took second at the state competition last year, facing a disqualification in an event that could have put them nine points ahead of the team that ended up taking State and moving on to Nationals.

“The guy that was disqualified last year…I watched him personally launch his [aircraft] 30, 60 times. [He] never had a problem with the launching apparatus,” Lamb said. “It had to stop on a dime to win and he worked so hard on straightening it out and he had it down. It wasn’t his fault. It was just a luck thing… The class helped eliminate bad luck. We still lost on bad luck last year but it helped. The more you practice, the more you work at things the smaller chance luck has on affecting the outcome, but it’s always going to be there to some extent.”

Along with that, Lamb believes that the class brought the team’s competitors together.

“We practiced so much more efficiently. I think it made a huge difference last year,” Lamb said. “Matter of fact, I think if our team had all been in the class, we could have rocked places. Not win by nine points, but rock the competition. We’ve had our run of bad luck so I think this is our year. We’re going to have to work just as hard as we did last year, and that’s awfully hard. We’ve got the students that have the ability and now we’ve got to put in the hard work.”

Coach Dick Nelson agrees.

“I was not surprised with all the talk of budget cuts, but I was disappointed. I think it made us better and it gave the students the opportunity to really dig deep…it was really worthwhile.” Nelson said. “The students we’re getting come in to take the test are just remarkable. We should be really good. Without the class, I don’t know if we can be as good as we were last year, but we’ll still be competitive.”

Students are being tested and a team will be decided in October. Until then, Nelson and Lamb are making plans to return to studying on the weekends.

“[The loss of the class] makes it much more difficult, but it isn’t like we can’t make it,” Lamb said. “We’re going to be there. We’re always there.”