A Foothills-area sixth-grader's artistic vision has made its way onto the uniforms of more than 700 Southwest Airlines pilots.
Lauren Heiser, an Esperero Canyon Middle School student, was one of two winners in the airline's Adopt-A-Pilot tie-design contest, which wrapped up a program that took airline pilots into elementary-school classrooms to demonstrate how math and science relate to everyday life. The company holds the tie-design contest every year.
Lauren's father, Kurt Heiser, is a Southwest Airlines pilot who participated in the program when she was a student at Ventana Vista Elementary School.
Lauren, 11, and Katie Shade, a sixth-grader from Glencoe, Ill., submitted designs that stood out among more than 1,500 nationwide. Southwest combined their designs.
Katie's parents are not Southwest employees.
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Lauren submitted her artwork in May 2006, while she was in an advanced-math class at Ventana Vista.
When she and her family received a phone call in January from Southwest saying she was one of the contest winners, she thought it was a joke, she said.
"There was a lady, she called my dad and told him I won, then she talked to me," Lauren said. "I didn't believe it at first."
Lauren and Katie's design features a Southwest Airlines jet flying over a red school with two people waving at the plane against a blue background.
Lauren sketched the two people and the airplane, while Katie drew the school, which has an American flag on top.
"I thought it would look pretty in the desert with a plane flying over it," she said.
The two people in the picture represent Lauren and her father, she said.
The airline recognized the girls last April by flying their families to the airline headquarters in Dallas to attend the program's 10th anniversary celebration.
Lauren mingled there with Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, President Colleen Barrett and former astronaut and current Southwest pilot Robert "Hoot" Gibson. She participated in the unveiling of a special Boeing 737 jet dedicated to the Adopt-A-Pilot program.
Lauren also visited some flight simulators used to train pilots and flight attendants.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a 10-year-old to meet the CEO of a Fortune 500 company," said her father.
"It's one of those things that will always motivate them in life."
Kurt Heiser took part in the program by visiting his daughter's class throughout the semester and using slingshots, model airplanes made by the students and field projects to teach math and science concepts, he said.
"My whole emphasis was to teach the kids how math and science applies to the whole world," he said.
Heiser's busy flying schedule allowed him to visit the class only about four times last year, but he would still assign homework, he said. "It would be an opportunity for them to look at the data we went over in the classroom," he said.
The program gives the pilots an opportunity to reach out to inner-city youth, but a separate component of the program allows pilots to pick a school, he said. Heiser had been involved in the program for the previous three years, he said.
He created his own lesson plans and collaborated with Lauren's teacher, Dianna Clark.
Clark said her students were fully engaged in the activities, which included making model airplanes out of balsa wood and throwing them to see how far they would fly.
"They love going out in the field and shooting the planes (using slingshots), figuring out how it can go farther," said Clark, a fourth-grade teacher at Ventana Vista. "I think it really gives them firsthand knowledge of how math can be applied to different subject areas."
Even though Lauren already excels in math, her favorite subject is writing. Her artwork, however, has made her popular among the Southwest pilots.
"I saw a captain wearing the tie. I told him I designed it and he had me autograph it," Lauren said.
Still, her father is her biggest fan. "I wear it pretty much all the time," he said. "It's like a badge of honor."
