CONRAD — Case Havelka has faced many challenges in his short life — the four-year-old son of Brent and Katie Havelka was born prematurely at 25 weeks, spent 110 days in the NICU, came home on oxygen support and was diagnosed with Periventricular leukomalacia (PVL), a serious brain injury, at just 11 weeks old along with cerebral palsy.

It’s been a long road since then, complete with physical and occupational therapy, intensive therapy in Chicago and various other treatments — at four, he remains nonverbal and unable to walk — but his parents, who reside between Beaman and Green Mountain, have always been overwhelmed by the support they’ve received as they navigate his journey.

“It has been tremendous. We have had a huge outpouring of support from our whole entire community from Marshalltown to Grundy to Tama, everywhere. They have outpoured a lot of love into him and our family,” Katie, a Class of 2008 MHS graduate, said.

On Wednesday morning, they got an especially meaningful gift at BCLUW High School in Conrad: a kids car Case that got to take for a spin through the hallways with his parents, two students who worked on the project, science teacher Roberta Vanderah and Emerson/Fisher retiree Nile Dielschneider all watching with pride.

“I think it’ll give him the chance to do some things that some other kids get to do and mobility for himself,” Vanderah said.

Katie Havelka said the connection was made because of her friendship with Vanderah’s daughter, and the teacher and her students — seniors Daniel Zoske and Olivia Rolston — spent most of the semester fine-tuning the vehicle, which has a children’s car seat installed and a joystick used for steering (it can also be controlled by his parents with a game controller).

“He will love it. He loves to be outdoors. He likes to have his own independence, so that’s something that’s really hard for him. His body wants to do something different than his brain,” Katie said, as Brent, a GMG alum, noted that he also loves side-by-side rides. “He’s very ready to be by himself, and he wants to be independent. So this is a great way to have him gain his own independence.”

Rolston said Vanderah, who is in her 14th and final year teaching at BCLUW, had wanted to complete a project of this nature for some time and finally found the right students for the task in herself and Zoske, who Vanderah praised for their perseverance throughout the process.

“We had to figure out how to completely take apart a car and put it back together… You learn to build stuff from taking things apart, so we had to tear apart a couple of carseats, rip them apart, (and) take out the seatbelts,” Zoske said. “It was a three-stage process where we had to get an idea and then put it together and see if it worked for (Case).”

They brought him in about three weeks into the project to test out the first idea, which was just padding in the carseat, and he didn’t fit — forcing them to rethink the specifications and come up with a whole new idea. Despite all of the trial and error, the finished product is something both soon-to-be Comet alums can be proud of for years to come.

“It’s been so amazing today to just see him smile and just get so happy when you put him in the car and it started moving,” Rolston said.

Dielschneider, who retired from Emerson as a labs systems specialist, lent his professional expertise throughout the journey, and he warned the students that the modifications would get “very complicated in a hurry” due to the setup of the vehicle, a miniature Chevy Silverado.

“What we had to do is come up with our own controller in there and figure all that out from scratch. I kind of showed these guys how programming is done and how you can control motors and real world devices with a little microcomputer in there. So it was a challenge,” he said. “And then we came up with a frame to help support it, and even that alone was a pretty good challenge.”

Rolston credited him for guiding them along the way.

“He knows, obviously, a lot about engineering and all the programming and how all the wiring comes together, so he’s really helped us a lot,” she said.

Zoske is considering studying science in college, while Rolston is planning to pursue architecture. Case is currently attending preschool at GMG, but his parents are strongly considering sending him to BCLUW for kindergarten in the fall.

“I think the beauty of this project has been being able to take all the things I’ve learned in school and actually being able to apply them to something real that’s gonna change lives,” Rolston said.

Green Products of Conrad provided funding for the project.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.