WADE - Students at District 7 Elementary School crowded in a circle on their grassy playground Thursday and craned their necks, as they looked toward the crisp blue sky.

The students chanted “five, four, three, two, one,” as students from the Academy of Green Technology at Douglas Byrd High School launched a white helium-filled weather balloon loaded with cameras, equipment and even a pink, stuffed "llamacorn," a cross between a llama and unicorn. 

First-grader Braxton Benson described later what he liked best about the day's science lesson:“I liked the part where they let it go." The weather balloon launch was months in the making, said Denise Renfro, director for the Academy of Green Technology. About two years ago she applied for a $15,000 grant through the Youth Growth Stock Trust through the United Way of Cumberland County. It led to the purchase of a weather balloon, helium tanks to inflate it and equipment that tracks it for students in her class.

To cover ongoing costs, she applied for another $5,000 grant last year through the Stephen Shane Fincher Memorial Foundation that allowed her students to visit six to eight Cumberland County schools this current school year.

A few months ago, 11-year-old Nyana McKoy, a fifth-grader at District 7 Elementary School, heard about the academy's weather balloons. She and her mother were visiting a school fair, and she saw her cousin at a table for the Academy of Green Technology.

Nyana likes to learn about weather in science class and thought the weather balloons were "cool."

That conversation led Renfro to reach out to Nyana’s principal at District 7 Elementary, and Becky Walker, lead science teacher for the school and a member of Cumberland County Schools’ Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math Team.

Leading up to Thursday’s weather balloon launch, Walker’s STEAM elementary students brainstormed about what experiments they could send up with the balloon.

The list of questions they generated for the projects included: “Will seeds grow differently, after going near space?” Will batteries still work?” and “What will happen to marshmallows?”

Fifth-grader Kayla Soto was learning about unicellular and multicellular organisms when she came up with her question.

“Mrs. Walker said that bacteria can survive almost everywhere, and that we wouldn’t be able to live without bacteria because you need good bacteria and bad bacteria and stuff so it’s like, 'Why don’t we send that to space to see if that survives?'” Kayla said.

Bacteria she and classmate incubated didn’t quite go to space, but reached a peak altitude of 92,854 feet, or almost 18 miles above the grassy playground of where Academy of Green Technology students launched the balloon and Kayla’s experiment in a box tethered to the balloon.Jamie Whitfield, a junior at the academy, said the weather balloon exceeds airplane altitudes.

“It goes so far to where you can see like the curvature of the atmosphere of the Earth, but it doesn’t technically go into space cause it’ll pop before then,” Jamie said.

How Jamie and her classmates are able to know how high the balloon went and where it’d land was through technology, or a lime green box tethered to the balloon called STRATOSTAR.

Michael Jurado, a junior at the academy, estimated STRATOSTAR costs about $8,000.

“That’s the main box we want to protect," Michael said. "Without that we can’t launch the balloon. If we were to launch that balloon up without that box, we would never know where it was going to go. So it’s basically like launching the balloon blind. What would be the point of launching it if you couldn’t get any data from it?”

As for that the data the box fed back to elementary students, the academy students or anyone else who wanted to track it, the balloon was in the air for 3-and-a-half hours before making its descent.

Renfro and Walker were on their way to a thorny, overgrown field with machetes late Thursday afternoon to retrieve it and the experiments.

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.