Little
Stony Creek
Trout Unlimited
Chapter 652
Virginia
Trout in the Classroom Program Reaches 100
Classrooms
More students than ever
participating in environmental education program
Trout in the Classroom, a
national environmental education program of Arlington-based
Trout Unlimited, has crossed a milestone in Virginia by reaching
100 classrooms for the 2009-2010 school year. This represents a
54-percent increase over the 2008-2009 school year. The program
now educates more than 15,000 students statewide, with about 46
percent in middle school, 32 percent in elementary school, and
32 percent in high school.
In the
program, students work with local TU chapters to receive eggs in
the fall, raise them in 55gallon aquariums until they are two-
to three-inch fingerling trout, and then release them in a
coldwater stream in the spring. In the process, students learn
about water quality, stream ecology, conservation ethics, and
biology.
“Since our first TIC program
in Martinsville five years ago, our volunteers have worked with
teachers and students to raise and release more than 30,000
trout,” says Richard Landreth, who is the program’s statewide
coordinator. “With a TIC program, students are engaged in a
hands-on experience that helps connect them to real-life stream
and watershed issues and challenges. Teachers find that having a
TIC program makes students more interested in learning as the
program is fun. When we can make the leaning experience fun,
learning becomes pleasurable and a long-lasting experience.”
This summer, the Virginia
Council of TU surveyed TIC teachers to find out how the program
and chapter coordinators had been performing overall. About 87
percent of the respondents said that the TIC program was
beneficial in meeting Standards of Learning (SOL) requirements.
In fact, one teacher used her TIC program to accomplish 13 of
the 14 Life Science SOL requirements. Another school, Mountain
View Elementary in Buena Vista, used its daily TIC journals to
publish a book,
Finding Our Way Home.
With each TIC program having
a start-up cost of about $1,200, new projects are supported by
cooperative partnerships between TU chapters, schools, local
businesses and foundations that often provide funding
assistance, and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland
Fisheries, which supplies eggs, educational and technical
support, and helps with the releases. Over the last two years,
these partnerships raised almost $50,000 in funding and in-kind
services for TIC projects. This year’s grants included a
four-year commitment of $40,000 from the American Electric Power
(AEP) Foundation to fund projects in Southwest Virginia, and
$5,000 from Dominion to initiate 10 new TIC sites in the state.
Teachers interested in
establishing TIC projects at their schools can start by visiting
www.troutintheclassroom.org
online or calling Richard Landreth at (540) 885-4209 for more
information.
About Trout Unlimited
Trout Unlimited is the
nation’s oldest and largest coldwater fisheries conservation
organization. It has over 140,000 members dedicated to
conserving, protecting and restoring North America’s trout and
salmon fisheries and their watersheds.
About the Virginia
Council of Trout Unlimited
The Virginia Council of
Trout Unlimited is made up of 16 chapters and 4,000 members
committed to conserving, protecting, and restoring the state's
mountain streams, spring creeks, and the trout fisheries they
support. Visit www.vctu.org.
