Conservation Education Award
In conjunction with the Museum’s annual Conservation Symposium, the Museum honors a local teacher involved with conservation education. Teachers can nominate themselves or be nominated by someone else. The selection committee evaluates each nominee based on their involvement with conservation education regarding the region’s native biodiversity.
Past winners include:
2007 Sarah Hurder, teacher at Brecksville/Broadview Heights High School
2006 Patty Spring, teacher at Dodge Intermediate School
2005 Randy Carmel, teacher at Wooster High School
2007
Conservation Teacher of the Year was awarded to Sarah Hurder, a teacher at Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School. Mrs. Hurder teaches an environmental science course that promotes hands-on learning and real-world experience. As one student wrote, “everything we learn we can apply to everyday life”. Tree identification is a component of the course which leads the students to understand forest succession and forest ecosystems.
Besides the school activities, Sarah Hurder spearheads and coordinates a voluntary clean-up along the Cuyahoga River. Not only does Sarah get students involved, but she gets her community involved AND the clean-up effort is not even in her community, but in the Cleveland Flats and Ohio City areas! These efforts show that Sarah’s environmental reach is far beyond just her community.
2006
On Friday, September 8th the Museum will proudly award the 2006 Conservation Teacher of the Year award to Patty Spring, 6th grade teacher at Dodge Intermediate School (Twinsburg School District). While attending the Museum’s 2005 Conservation Symposium, Mrs. Spring met and partnered with naturalist Stanley Stine. She created a yearlong adventure for her students to explore vernal ponds. They worked in a nearby Metropark and in the classroom. With assistance of the art teacher, Mrs. Spring organized students, parents, and the PTO in the refurbishing of the school’s pavilion into a outdoor lab. Sale of “salamander” cookies, baked by parents and decorated by students and local senior citizens, help raise funds for the project.
Mrs. Spring also coordinated the school’s weeklong Earth Day celebration. She is not only promoting awareness of the environment with her students, but also within the Twinsburg community. Mrs. Spring was recently interview about her projects on the Twinsburg Channel 9 public access station.Mrs. Spring plans on conducting a yearlong study of a tributary stream for the upcoming 2006-07 school year.
2005
Randy Carmel received the 2005 Conservation Teacher of the Year award at the annual Conservation Symposium held in September 2005. Mr. Carmel, science teacher at Wooster High School, initiated the “Tallgrass Prairie Reconstruction Project” through the schools Science Club. As part of this project Mr. Carmel coauthered a $330,000 Clean Ohio Grant that was a community based volunteer driven initiative that was in cooperation with the Ohio Department of Wildlife and the school’s Science Club. As part of the project, students collected, cleaned and stratified prarie seeds then grew and tended to the plants in a greenhouse until they were ready to be planted at Killbuck Wildlife Area. Extra plants were sold at the school’s annual Spring Wildflower Fundraiser. The funds collected help to reinvest back into the project and to pay for Science Club fieldtrips and activities.