The pennies came in bags of every shape and size.
In the span of a single week in May of 1986, students across West Virginia collected over a million one-cent coins. It was enough to commission a statue of Christa McAuliffe, one that still stands in Charleston, W. Va., today.
The statue captures the Teacher in Space from the waist up. It depicts Christa holding her space helmet in one hand and a pen in the other, writing in a journal while staring off at somewhere above the horizon line.
“That was something that involved my whole state, that involved all the children, and it gave an honor to teachers everywhere,” said Melanie Vickers, who spearheaded the initiative alongside a friend.
Vickers met Christa during the Teacher in Space competition in Washington, D.C., when the two were selected as semifinalist representatives from their respective states. They were paired in the same group for portions of the week, which involved space classes, guest speakers, field trips and a visit to the White House.
During those seven days, Christa stood out for her vivaciousness, Vickers said. When Christa progressed in the competition, Vickers returned home to West Virginia, staying tuned in to the Teacher in Space project from afar.
“I think she was chosen because she was such a wonderful communicator. She had such a vibrant personality,” she said of Christa. “She was so attractive, and she talked about what she thought was the most important thing, which was that ordinary people were the ones who were really the extraordinary people in this world. And that was the message she gave to her students.”
When it came time for Christa’s launch, Vickers and many other Teacher in Space semifinalists flew to Cape Canaveral in support. But after a series of delays pushed the flight date back, Vickers had to return to the elementary school where she had just become principal.
On January 28, 1986, she set up televisions across the school so all the teachers and students could watch. She felt frozen in shock after the explosion.
“And I turned and looked and the first thing I remember is the kindergarteners looking at me, staring at me, because they knew something bad had happened but they didn’t know what,” she said.
Vickers traveled to the Challenger crew’s memorial service at the Johnson Space Center alongside other Teacher in Space participants.
“We were just devastated, all of us. And on my way back, I said to myself, ‘What can I do?’ I just kept remembering those kindergarteners, those children looking at me thinking, ‘How are we supposed to react? What are we supposed to do?’ And I kept thinking of, ‘What can I do to help the kids deal with this?'” she said.
A conversation with a friend yielded the idea for a statue. They brought the plan to the state’s superintendent of schools and picked a week in May of 1986 for the collection process.
A bank agreed to house the pennies. Vickers will never forget going to see the mountains of bags, each filled with small copper coins. The piles were so large she could sit on them.
The state-wide effort raised enough money to pay a sculptor, who got to work as soon as he could, even melting some of the collected pennies into the statue itself. The project was unveiled in Charleston on the one year anniversary of the Challenger disaster.
“They helped me, because when they stepped up and donated all those pennies, they turned my grief into hope,” Vickers said of West Virginia’s students. “It was the reverse. I was going to help them, but they helped me.”
In the decades since, she has remained active with NASA and the Challenger Center, founded by the crew’s families to facilitate interactive science education. She attended the launch of Teacher in Space backup Barbara Morgan, who flew to space in 2007. While there, Vickers got to ride in the “Vomit Comet” aircraft and experience weightlessness in the same way Christa had during her NASA training. Her dedication to the Teacher in Space program also took her to space camp, and she eventually joined the West Virginia Civil Air Patrol and taught a graduate class on space.
In the forty years since that shocking January morning when it felt as if the world itself went silent, Vickers has never forgotten the vibrant teacher named Christa, who she met in her group in Washington, D.C. in 1985.
She has traveled to Concord to visit the classrooms in which Christa taught and visited Christa’s Girl Scout camp, Camp Wabasso, where a house was dedicated with a plaque bearing her name.
Christa’s mantra, “I touch the future, I teach,” forever resonates with Vickers.
“The future sits in our classrooms every day,” she said. “We are going back to the moon and beyond, and it’s the children in our classrooms right now who will be the space travelers, taught by teachers.”
