Civic Responsibilty

Today my students learned a nice concrete lesson in civic responsibility that I wanted to share. Across the street from my school is a large park. The park features a small nature preserve with bison, deer, and elk that were injured and couldn’t be released back to nature for one reason or another, although some have been born there. We also used to have a farm zoo during the summer months. Sadly our city government is struggling to pay all our bills (who isn’t in this economy?) and closed down the farm zoo. They were also considering closing the nature preserve section, but donors came forward to keep that. Anyway, today was a mini-photo shoot to show how people support the zoo, with the hope of getting it properly funded for this year. It took a bit of effort, but I got all the parents to agree that their kids could be in the local paper and off we went. Along the way, we talked about how we were helping support the zoo and that each person can do something if they’ll just DO something. Hopefully the fact that we dealt with something they are all so familiar with, will help them really learn the lesson.