Seeking to get involved with the Toledo Zoo and its work within schools, Owens Corning Foundation is donating $500,000 to the Toledo Zoo’s Project Prairie over the next five years.
“Owens Corning has been recognized as a sustainability leader many times over the years and a big part of our sustainability effort focuses on caring for our communities and protecting our environments,” foundation president Don Rettig said at a news conference Thursday formalizing his organization’s commitment.
Chase STEMM Academy in North Toledo, which played host to Thursday’s event, will be one of several area schools that are taking part in the program, run by the zoo, which plants a natural northwest Ohio prairie on a school site, to engage students and teacher’s in hands-on learning about nature and wildlife.
Zoo officials said that the donation will allow the project, which is currently in 20 locations, to expand into as many as 50 additional schools and that any area school can apply to take part in the project, though there is an emphasis on Toledo Public Schools and Washington Local Schools.
Roxanne Allen, principal at Chase STEMM Academy, said the focus of the program, which has roots dating back to 2014 and the zoo’s Wild Toledo program, is on urban students like those in her K-8 school and she feels it is a perfect fit.
“In urban spaces, there is not always a lot of green space because there are buildings all around,” Mrs. Allen said. “But to have a campus where we have quite a bit of green space, bringing in this prairie when we already have the Manhattan Marsh. It gives these students an additional opportunity to interact with their environment.”
The Chase prairie will be planted in the part of the school’s property facing Bassett Street and is set to be fully bloomed by next fall. The zoo is currently ensuring the ground is ready and will be planting in late November. Next summer, the zoo will train the staff at Chase in some of the ins and outs of their new resource and the ways it can best be utilized in the classroom.
Chase is one of four STEMM academies in the Toledo Public Schools, all of which are now interacting with Project Prairie. Mrs. Allen said having this resource is perfect for the project-based learning and hands-on learning that the Toledo Public Schools STEMM academies were founded to do, taking students outside the confines of books.
“It is the basis for what we do in the Ohio STEM learning network,” she said. “We are going to consider this schoolwide project-based learning. It will be a couple year process before we have a mature prairie but we are not going to wait until then to do lessons.”
Mrs. Allen said she is looking forward to how the younger students at the school will be able to watch the prairie grow over the next few years, which is a lesson in itself.
Third-grade students at the school released some monarch butterflies during the media event Thursday as part of a study and Mrs. Allen said monitoring prairie-dwelling animals or insects like butterflies, which are attracted by prairie plants such as milkweed, could be yet another way in which the environment could yield various lesson plans.
Mitch Magdich, the zoo’s education curator, said that, in fact, one of project prairie’s main purposes is to enhance the average curriculum and take it to places it has never been before.
Prairie plants store more carbon in the soil than average forests, Mr. Magdich said, mentioning they can have roots that go down 14 feet. This fact could be a gateway for Project Prairie students to study advanced concepts and things like carbon offsets, because the school ground itself, by providing a home for a bit of prairie, is providing the environment with a carbon offset.
Mr. Magdich also sees Project Prairie curriculum being tied to citizen science programs like Monarch Watch, or Globe. Through those programs, students can collect data on organisms, soil, or weather around their prairies that then go back to real scientists and researchers as beneficial work. Much of that collecting would occur in the late summer and early fall when prairies are in full bloom.
He sees the zoo’s purpose as going beyond entertainment and into the conservation sector, focusing on getting people to turn their attention to the wildlife in their own backyards. That’s a place where monarch butterflies are just as important as, say, tigers might be in India or other exotic animals one might see at the zoo might be in their own native habitats.
“We care about wildlife and habitats,” he said. “There is an adage that goes, ‘Think globally, act locally.’ Like it is hard for people in Toledo to do much about deforestation in the rain forest in Brazil.”
“But they can have an impact on what is happening around them, like the Maumee River or Lake Erie when we had that whole debacle with the microcystin in 2014,” Mr. Magdich said in reference to the city of Toledo’s algae-driven water crisis.
“Prairies and adding these types of native habitats help the environment overall, not just the prairie but they do a lot to help air quality and mitigate climate change,” Mr. Magdich said.
First Published September 22, 2022, 9:07 p.m.
