Every year  when Greg Lopatka was at Randolph School, he would get a call from John Kent, Chairman of the Science Fair Exhibit Committee.  Now that John is retired,  Allen Nelson calls and Greg says, "yes". 
Greg has been posting CPS Science Fair Web pages since 1996 when he was posting the Randolph Web page.  When He retired in 2001, some of the early pages were removed from the Randolph website, so He has been posting them on his lopatka.net site. Allen had the unenviable task of trying to fill the big shoes of John Kent, but he has come through with flying colors for the past 2 years.  He used his long time experience with John and the members of the Exhibits Committee to pull off this Herculean task.
2 years ago, the Mayor gave an inspirational speech to the stu

dents and asked the TV cameras to turn and give some air time to the students that worked for months on their projects.  He mentioned that the law breaking protesters get hours of news coverage  while these kids go unnoticed.  The Mayor didn't show up for the second year in a row up and all of the TV camera crews found more important things to cover, so the students were pushed aside again.
Anyone that has ever tried to motivate teenagers into creating a science project knows that it helps when they get some media coverage.  It is no wonder that students feel that they have an easier time trying to get famous with sports achievements. 

Exit Committee members, Marvin Nochowitz and Ramya Sivaraj