Jessica Dockery of United Way of Collier and the Florida Keys joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about an education program with NOAA.
What is the NOAA Ocean Guardian School District Program?
Dockery said, “NOAA has an educational program that helps schools and school districts around the country to be stewards of the ocean environment, and so Monroe County School District schools have been doing individual Ocean Guardian school programs for years, and they’ve been great at it. But a few years ago, we learned a little secret, that NOAA also had a district program. I thought, why aren’t we that? We have an amazing district here, amazing kids already doing great work, and so we kind of put that in motion, and here we are, several years later, it’s actually getting going. So the school district decided to do rainwater filtration gardens and Sugar Loaf and Poinsettia and Key West are all of our pilot schools that are kicking that off for the district. So Sugarloaf is the third one to get it done in the last couple of weeks, and we’re looking forward to them kind of finalizing this pilot program with their garden installation.”
The rainwater filtration garden installation will happen tomorrow at 7:45 a.m. at the Sugarloaf School.
Dockery said, “It’s a great land based program for a lot of students to participate in. We’ve got kids that are out there in the water, on water, doing a lot of great work. The Coral Shores kids up here are diving regularly in the water, but this project allows kids to do something productive from the land, and really shows that there’s a lot of different ways to protect our ocean resources around here.”
A lot of organizations are involved with the program.
Dockery said, “We need everybody to be involved. There’s going to be more schools in the future that are doing this, and anybody that we can get to support these kids and the work that they’re doing in any form or fashion, we welcome that. We want the whole community to be part of this, and there’s going to be a lot of outreach that these kids are going to be doing to try and show the community what’s possible. So we appreciate everybody’s support and rallying behind what they’re doing. It’s going to be a benefit, and not just to their campus. It’s going to be beautiful, but it’ll benefit all of us. All of these gardens will truly benefit everybody in the Keys, especially if you even secondarily, rely on a healthy ocean for your income or recreation. This benefits you. These are our pilot schools, kind of kicking it off and showing us how to do it, but other schools are going to be involved over the next couple years. So stay tuned and stay supportive.”
For more information, click here: https://uwcollierkeys.org/