Abstract: “Would you like to travel with a group of FCS students to view the total eclipse of the Sun in April 2024?” This was the simple yet powerful question I posted on a January 2023 flyer at Friends’ Central, a nursery-12th grade Quaker school in the Philadelphia area. By summer, 27 students from grades 9-12 were selected for this, my Moonshadow Team. In August, I trained them in eclipse literacy, then broke them into small groups based on their talents and interests to run a broader public outreach program. The Art Team was in charge of designing and self-printing T-shirts, hoodies, name tags and more. The Public Relations team included students who designed a website and ran social media accounts for us. We had a Research Team, Event Planners, Public Speakers, a Telescope Equipment Management Team and more, all to host a set of local public workshops to help folks prepare for the October 14, 2023 and April 8, 2024 solar eclipses. In April 2024, the group traveled to Vermont where we continued the outreach work with the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain. In this talk, I will detail the epic story of corralling high school students to host 8 months of eclipse preparation workshops as well as the science we did at our culminating event and continuing work in student engagement.
