Riverside County Supervisors Tuesday unanimously voted to provide $100,000 in funding to support Murrieta Valley Unified School District’s (MVUSD) telescope project. The money will come from the District 3 Unincorporated Communities Initiative fund.
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“A very unique circumstance came about where they have a project that they want to do, and it happened to be at one of their schools that is outside of the city limits,” District 3 Supervisor Chuck Washington said at the September 22 meeting. “In other words, their school sits in the unincorporated area, which opened up some funding and collaboration opportunities for the Third District with the school.”
The MVUSD telescope project is a partnership between the district and the Temecula Valley Astronomers Club to bring two professional-grade telescopes back to life for the benefit of students and members of the community.
“We’re excited to unveil this project and provide this opportunity for elementary school students, for middle school students and high school students and members of our community to have that first light moment, that aha,” MVUSD Trustee Elliot Emmer said at the meeting. “There’s so much going on in our solar system and in our universe.”
The telescopes, originally donated to the school more than 20 years ago, will eventually be installed at an observatory between Dorothy McElhinney Middle School and Lisa J. Mails Elementary School in the unincorporated community of French Valley.
“They never were permanently mounted or fixed, because we thought we had to build an observatory and that meant going to the Department of State Architecture, which meant a lot more money and so they were never actually installed,” MVUSD Superintendent Ward Andrus said at the meeting.
According to Andrus, once the telescopes are installed, one will be able to track stellar objects through the night and the other will be able to monitor the sun during the day with feeds from each streaming live on the district’s website.
“It’s been said that intelligence is distributed equally among the populations, but opportunities are not,” Andrus said. “So it’s incumbent on us to create opportunities so that everyone has an opportunity to grow and be exposed to many different things.”
With the county’s funding, the district will be able to install the necessary electrical and telecommunication wiring, tracks to allow the telescopes to move, secure housing for each telescope and security fencing.
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