Head O’ Meadow Students

Raise Money To Aid Rainforests

By Jeff White

Every second, 200 yards of the world’s rainforests succumb to deforestation and destruction.

Although that statistic might seem staggering, there are now 38,750 square feet of Latin American rainforest that will not suffer such a fate, thanks to five Head O’ Meadow School fourth graders: Katie Schmidt, Emily Loose, Danny Giorno, Josh Friedman, and Alex Grier. They chose to approach their social studies unit on Brazil by researching one of the most salient environmental issues of the 1990s: the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

For Emily’s part, she breathed a sigh of relief when the money started to come in for their fundraising efforts. “I didn’t think we could save that much. When we first got started, I didn’t think we could get $10 [for the rainforest]. I stayed awake at night,” she recalled. In the end, the group raised $155, mostly through collecting spare change.

The spare change idea came from Danny Giorno, who thought to put a collection bin by the main office into which students, faculty members, and parents could deposit some of the loose change jingling in their pockets.

As the bin gradually began to fill up, the five students were busy in the library and at home, doing research about rainforests on the Internet. Josh Friedman compiled a book about how to help denuded forests in regions around the world as diverse as the Amazon, Africa and Alaska. 

By combining research with their activism, the five students were able to reason why global deforestation was a major environmental problem about which all should be concerned. “We need the rainforests for the medicine we use, for coffee, and chocolate. We get a lot of great things from the rainforests,” Emily Loose said.

“We’ve got to save not only the Amazon, but other rainforests around the world,” Alex Grier explained. Specifically, funds raised by the Head O’ Meadow group went to aid the National Arbor Day Foundation’s Rain Forest Rescue program. 

The foundation’s rescue project is currently taking on rainforest conservation issues in Belize, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru. Moreover, their efforts, according to John Rosenow, the president of the National Arbor Day Foundation, will help Latin American coffee farmers “preserve their sustainable, organic methods of raising rich, shade grown coffee.”

Head O’ Meadow money will go not only to protecting rainforest parcels that have remained free of deforestation, but to also help replanting efforts in areas in which massive amounts of rainforest have been destroyed.

The group knows how much rainforest it has saved due to a simple equation supplied by Mr Rosenow’s foundation: $10 saves approximately 2,500 square feet of forest.

The efforts of these five students did not stop at collecting money. They wrote a letter to the president of Brazil about their concern for that country’s natural resources. They have actively encouraged boycotting certain area gasoline companies that have a record of contributing to the destruction of the world’s rainforests. Appropriately enough, the students have turned a tree house in Katie Schmidt’s back yard into “central headquarters” for the group’s ongoing work with the issue.

“It became really fun saving the rainforest,” Danny Giorno said. “We had to do all the studying, but when we raised the money, we felt really good about ourselves.”

Many school projects can only hope to engage students’ mild curiosity and interest. The fourth grade social studies Brazilian unit, which spent a considerable amount of time on an environmental concern tied irrevocably to the country, yielded scores of students that tackled the issue of rainforests from every possible angle: wildlife, plant life, varying layers. Out of such a large, classwide project, five students came away with a feeling of ownership to the land that they had been studying. They now believe that the money they raised has entitled them to personally see to the rainforests’ protection.

“We are saving a lot,” explained Katie Schmidt. “Once the new trees grow, they cannot be cut. They are ours.

“It feels really, really good that we own part of the rainforest, that we know it will stand forever.”