KC students' energy powers electric car across America

The road the Kansas City teenagers will be traveling — crossing America from the Pacific to the Atlantic in an electric car they helped design and build — isn't the longest road in this story.Nor is it the hardest.And that's saying a lot, considering the logistics involved in making themselves national ambassadors for clean energy and for the industrious potential of the next generation."I was concerned we would not be able to go," said 18-year-old Elias Williams, aware of some of the trials the volunteer organization Minddrive was going through to get the teens and their mentors on the road.
"We're trying to share not just our story," he said, "but the story that this can be done, this hands-on education. We can do this. And you can, too."Their sponsors are sending them off today with a noon celebration at Union Station, dispatching them and their modified 1977 Lotus Esprit to Southern California and Interstates 8 and 10. They'll haul it by trailer to San Diego and then head east.This will be easier: Cruising through jack-rabbit scrublands in Arizona, the 360-degree horizon of West Texas, past Stuckey's restaurants, bridging bright coastal bays on the Gulf Coast, the Bayou, all the way to steamy Florida.
Along the 10-day tour, electric car clubs are planning to join them on the road. At two dozen or more communities they'll be meeting up with students at their high schools to share experiences in engineering and technology education.It's quite a feat, considering the longer road.That goes back to Steve Rees, an architect who failed to manage his classroom five years ago when he tried to teach a creative class on entrepreneurial studies for the DeLaSalle Education Center, an alternative school.
From that sobering experience grew an independent Saturday morning class that brings together some 20 students at a time from a variety of Kansas City schools, mostly charters.
Williams, a journalism-minded graduate of Lincoln College Preparatory Academy, remembered when he first joined Minddrive in the spring of 2011.He was looking around at the faces of the students, up too early on a Saturday morning, heavy and sullen, gathered from different high schools that don't always get along.
And there was Kelvin Duley, a DeLaSalle grad and returning student of the Minddrive class telling everyone during the ice-breaker in the Midtown garage what a "big happy family" they would be, Williams recalled."I'm thinking, ‘Yeah. That's not happening.'?"The car-building class and clean-energy mission that awaited them wasn't even what Rees had imagined when he naively embarked on his education endeavor at DeLaSalle.