After more than two decades in charge of an asset that sets North Medford apart from every other high school in Oregon, planetarium director Robert Black is retiring and passing the torch to a successor.

Standing beneath the school’s 30-foot dome and beside the planetarium’s state-of-the-art console, incoming director Megan Laurenti said she’s landed her dream job.

“This is the job that I have worked my whole life for,” Laurenti said. “I feel like the universe put me here.”

Laurenti is ready for the new role thanks to a year of cross-training stationed in the classroom adjacent to Black’s, and she brings 12 years of high school teaching experience, which includes five years teaching astronomy at Silverton High School.

During a brief tour, Laurenti showcased her mastery of the Evans & Sutherland Digistar 7 planetarium system and its Show Builder program, which allows her and student assistants to make tailor-made presentations for lesson plans. It draws from realtime data, including the region’s topography, to accurately simulate the degree at which the sun will rise and fall on a specific date, and what the Rogue Valley’s night sky will look like that night. Laurenti then shifted the custom-made program to showcase the constellation of Orion before taking an up-close look at Betelgeuse.

“This girl can fly the ship,” Black said.

In his tenure at the high school since 2002, Black has grown the astronomy program into one that frequently has the school’s brightest students volunteering in NASA programs — and helping launch the aerospace, engineering and astronomy careers of numerous alums in the process. It’s a relief for Black to know there’s a successor who not only matches the technical requirements of the job, but the dynamic personality needed to do everything from engaging elementary students in field trips to the planetarium to coaching advanced students working through NASA-grade engineering challenges on the high school’s Stellarxplorers team.

The job requires someone who is a certified teacher with a strong knowledge base in astronomy, physics and math, as well as strong people skills with students of all ages, according to Black. The district organizes field trips to the planetarium for first- and fifth-graders in an effort to inspire them to get involved in the astronomy program.

“They’re already excited for it before they even come into the high school,” Laurenti said.

Having a successor ready to take the reins is a relief for Black. He said he approached six potential successors in the fall of 2022, but for different reasons each declined. Some told him they were great with students in some age groups but not so great with others. One of his picks had found a position in administration, while others were reluctant to devote themselves to the same number of after-school and extracurricular projects that Black did. 

“And I just said, ‘OK, I guess I can’t retire.’ I can’t,” Black said. “Because you can’t just quit a job, right? You can’t just say, ‘Let’s get a sub in here.'”

Then one day in January 2023, Laurenti sent an email out of the blue.

Laurenti was on South Medford’s faculty last year as a general science teacher when she learned about North’s planetarium through a news report. In November 2022, the school installed the all-new digital system and projector.

She emailed Black that winter expressing interest in the astronomy program and offering to help.

To steep Laurenti in the program, Black had her attend a Southern Oregon Skywatchers meeting. Black had long worked with club cofounder Dave Bloomness, and he worked to integrate the local astronomy club into his curriculum as a place where his students could give presentations, show off their astrophotography projects and meet mentors.

By Laurenti’s second meeting, she became president.

“And that just immediately plugged her into 50 people in the community,” Black said.

For the 2023-24 school year, Laurenti put in for a transfer to North Medford and got a classroom next to Black’s. It allowed Black to make quick pointers on a complicated system.

Leaving the astronomy program ‘bigger and better’

Through close work with NASA, Black has given students unforgettable hands-on experiences in his time leading North’s astronomy program. On Aug. 17, 2017, for instance, NASA worked with Black and 10 students to launch a high-altitude balloon that filmed the total eclipse. 

Above all else, North Medford High School Principal Allen Barber praised Black’s unwavering commitment to his program.

“He’s one of a kind,” Barber said. “He believes in a strong work ethic.” 

Black has helped students with 130 senior projects over the course of his career. He said his strong belief in project-based learning was what drew him to North in the first place. He lamented that the required 35-hour student projects went away during the coronavirus pandemic and never returned.

“That’s how you get them to the next level,” Black said. 

And he has more experiences and accomplishments than he can count.

He met famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson; the two were photographed together wearing North Medford baseball caps.

And in 2014, he and Bloomness with Southern Oregon Skywatchers flew with NASA aboard its Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy aircraft equipped with a telescope roughly the size of the Hubble.

As grateful as Black is for his experiences, he’s more grateful to his wife, Cherise, “who’s put up with me being gone all these evenings and doing all these projects.”

Black said she would often stay home to focus on her work as a middle school math teacher and the needs of her students.

“She always checked my math for me,” Black said.

North Medford’s planetarium: one-of-a-kind in the West

Of the 353 planetariums in the United States, only 30 are installed in high schools. North Medford’s is the only high school planetarium in a West Coast state. The next-nearest high school with a planetarium is Capital High School in Boise, Idaho.

North’s planetarium opened with the high school in 1967 funded by grant contributions stemming from President Eisenhower’s National Defense Education Act, which later became a NASA grant program.

It featured a Spitz A3P optical-mechanical star ball, which Black said was the “best planetarium system in the world 55 years ago.”

There were 729 planetariums across the country in 1970, but as of late 2023 only 206 were still in service.

When Medford’s opened in August 1967, then-superintendent Elliott Becken was quoted as saying, “Educators in Oregon visualize the time when planetariums will be a required part of the curriculum of all Oregon secondary schools.”

Black is the high school’s third planetarium director. The first was Jack Fink, who ran it from 1967 to 1984, and Gary Sprague ran it from 1986 to 2002.

Black estimates the precision-engineered aluminum within the dome, which gives the planetarium its 3D effects, would alone cost $1 million today.

“It was a golden age,” Black said.

“This is such an amazing resource for Southern Oregon,” Laurenti said. “I want to share it.”

Laurenti and Principal Barber both said they want to make the planetarium more of a community resource.

According to Laurenti and Black, part of that is out of necessity. The planetarium was forced to make the transition to digital two years ago, after Spitz discontinued parts and service — including the specialized xenon bulb at the center of the system — at the end of 2022.

In response, the Medford School Board authorized spending $205,800 for the renovation and upgrades on Feb. 3, 2022, according to Evans & Sutherland. The company had merged with Spitz in 2006.

Black and Laurenti said the Digistar 7 system that replaced it is cutting edge but comes with some significantly higher programming costs. Licensing professional planetarium programs can cost between $3,000 and $5,000 apiece, according to Laurenti.

“The planetarium budget for the longest time was $300,” Black said.

Laurenti said she is in the early stages of considering sponsorship programs with Southern Oregon businesses to help cover some of the costs.

“It’s a large donation, but it’s not crazy large for them,” Laurenti said.

She asks anyone who may be interested in contributing to email her at megan.laurenti@medford.k12.or.us.