By ALANA LISTOE Independent Record | Posted: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 12:00 am

High school students considered three cases Tuesday: a female found dead with injection marks in her arm; a 25-year-old male found dead and naked in a hotel room; and a male found dead face down in his bedroom. The scenarios were presented by state toxicologist Jim Hutchinson through an interactive videoconferencing call with Helena High School, North Star High School in Rudyard and the Montana Crime Lab in Missoula.

The students in Jim Schulz’s CSI class at Helena High spent the class period Tuesday going over toxicology reports on the cases in an attempt to determine the cause, manner and mechanism by which the people died.

Selina Northey enjoyed taking a break from a typical day of labs using microscopes, slides and beakers to learn about toxicology.

Northey, a Helena High senior, was particularly interested because she’s on the Science Olympiad team working in the CSI event at the national competition in May.

“I liked how we got to talk to people who do this for a living — it’s important because they do this kind of science every day,” Northey said.

Attorney General Steve Bullock attended the event and even offered the students a few answers when they got stumped. “Videoconferencing allows us to bring kids into the crime lab in a matter that is not disruptive to our scientists or the evidence they handle,” he said. “It’s a great way to reach out to Montana students and provide them a unique and relevant science experience.”

Helena School District Superintendent Bruce Messinger said bringing science from the crime lab to students in the classroom via videoconferencing is a great opportunity — it saves the district time and money because there’s no need to bus students. Bullock, a former Helena High student, said people didn’t really know what a crime lab was until recent years and the launch of a number of CSI television shows.

“There’s a big difference between the CSI on TV and CSI Montana,” he told the students. “These folks are solving the crimes in Montana and they don’t get a commercial break.”

The students didn’t “solve” the cases, but they did discuss a number of possibilities.

In most cases discussed during the videoconference, a number of chemicals were found in blood, urine or eye fluid samples. In the past nine years, the cases dealing with methadone and oxycodone have significantly increased, Hutchinson said.

Methadone went from being identified in 28 crime lab cases in 2001 to 121 in 2009. Oxycodone increased to 154 cases last year from 62 in 2001.

“If you look at the trend indicators, you’ll see we have an ongoing problem,” Hutchinson said.

Senior Anna Hazen wasn’t surprised by those increases. She said the class videoconferencing with the crime lab was interesting, even though she probably won’t go into forensic science after graduating.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to learn more about the CSI atmosphere,” she said. “We can use what we’ve been learning and where we are headed in our curriculum.”

The videoconferencing was provided by Vision Net, a Montana company that’s been involved with higher education outreach efforts since 1995.

“We do educational videoconferencing every single day,” CEO Rob Ferris said.

Ferris said the crime lab teaching endeavors fall under the purview of the company’s new content-coordinator position, created to facilitate such opportunities.

“We’ve experienced great success with distance learning over the years and wanted to expand into new student learning opportunities,” he said. “Bringing together forensic scientists and science students seems a great match.”

Alana Listoe: 447-4081

Taken From: helenair.com

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