Kay County Conservation District’s “Friend of Education”

Kay County Conservation District helps local schools fill the school year with conservation activities and one school honored the district manager as it closed for the summer.

In February district staff picked up 25 trees at the Keyes Correctional Facility in Fort Supply. These containerized trees are grown by the prisoners in a program funded by Wheatland RC&D. The trees are free to non-profit organizations and schools. They planted nine trees at the conservation district office. With the rest of the trees, Susan Henning, district manager, spent a day planting a tree with each classroom at Tonkawa Elementary School. She also planned and coordinated a week-long Earth Week celebration at the school with an activity for each class.

Pre-kindergarten through first grade students watched the Hopper the Frog puppet explain about “Insect Heroes.” Second-graders made dirt babies and third-graders learned about trees and acted out the “Tree Factory.” Fourth-graders got hands-on activity learning about nonpoint source pollution prevention using the Enviroscape watershed model. Fifth-graders became environmental testing companies and found the “toxic” lemonade buried in pans of sand. Earth Team volunteers Dianne Jeans and Betty Schwanke helped with the dirt babies and Jeans also was the puppeteer.

During an assembly on the last day of school in May the school district awarded Henning its “Friend of Education!”