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You're a biology teacher in a small rural school in southern West Virginia with less than 1,000 students in grades 7-12. You have a yearly budget of $28 for supplies and 120 receptive and highly motivated sophomore biology students to spend it on. The students from your two previous years of teaching sophomore biology are begging for more work in the life sciences and the principal of the school is reluctant to add more classes because the school has always had only one year of biology and it's too much trouble to change. You want to open up your classroom more and provide more outside experiences and the principal wants less noise and more discipline. This was the situation my students and I found ourselves in and this is how we are dealing with it. All organisms seem to share three alternatives when faced with an unendurable situation: they can perish, migrate, or adapt. My students and I are too young to die and we love the southern West Virginia mountains too much to migrate, so we found a viable adaptation-we organized an ecology club. We started our club in 1972 with a membership of 35 that has grown to over 200. We have won seven state conservation awards, a Garden Club "Best of Show" award, and the Ecology Council of America's award for the last two years for the "top environmental project in the State of West Virginia." We have been featured in Senior Scholastic Magazine and ECO-AMERICA News, and we have received a great deal of state and local coverage for our projects. We have received honors, awards, and commendations from the President of the United States, the governor of West Virginia, and one of our U.S. senators. Four of our members have participated in the biology summer honors program at West Virginia University, one in the summer ecology honors program at Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and two in the Florida ecology honors program at the University of Iowa. In addition to those seven fortunate young people, ten students have won camperships to the West Virginia Conservation Leadership Camp, two were accepted to work at the National Youth Conservation Training Camp at Camp Wood near Lewisburg, W.Va., and eleven were chosen to work on the State Conservation Program at Pipestem and Bluestone State Parks. I am convinced that what we have done at Hinton High School can be done anywhere at any grade level. The idea started with the expressed desire by some junior and senior students for more work in the life sciences. They were dissatisfied by the lack of additional biology courses to substitute for study hall or other courses that they felt they did not need or want. If the school would not offer junior and senior level biology classes, would it be acceptable to form a club that could provide added experiences in biology? A favorable response from the principal led to an organizational meeting of the Hinton High School Ecology Club. The 35 students who showed up elected officers and voted to assess themselves dues of one dollar per year. Then, with the business part of the meeting out of the way, the fledgling members looked at each other and asked, "Now what?" As the sponsoring faculty member, I looked outward to Concord College and to a successful high school conservation club in a nearby city for advice and guidance on what the club might do. My search for guidance quickly led me to believe that whatever the club did must come from the club members themselves and be tailored to their needs and the resources and needs of the community. We decided to do a county-wide land use survey. The results were not very exciting, since they only verified the fact that there were no strip mines or polluting industries in our county. What we did have was a breathtaking scenic wilderness where wildlife roams the forested mountains and a large variety of fish swim the magnificently wild New, Bluestone, and Greenbrier Rivers. It appeared to be an area without ecological problems. In the meantime, our membership was steadily growing. It was like having 56 Smokey-the-Bears and no forest fire to warn people about or to put out. Since we had no ecological dragons to joust, we decided to enter a float in the homecoming parade. We would incorporate an ecological theme into the normal pledges of confidence in our football heroes! The result was a "tiger," attired in the upcoming opponents' colors receiving a bath, and another similarly dressed "tiger" being swept into a trash can. The caption read "Clean Up Shady Springs." Word spread that the new ecology club planned to do something different with their float and the night we built it, 12 new members The author teaches biology at Hinton High School, Hinton, W.Va. 25951. She holds B.S. and M.A. degrees in biological science education and is presently working on a D.Ed. in environmental education at West Virginia University. Davison settled on her 16-acre chicken and guinea fowl farm in Forest Hill, W.Va., in 1970, after dealing with an attack of "wanderlust" that took her to most of the States and Canada and Mexico. She was named West Virginia State Conservation Educator of the Year in 1974. |
