Location: PIGEON FORGE GREENWAY
Description: 5K run/walk AND New this year a kids 1 mile fun run, featuring the Beauty of the Greenway in Pigeon Forge. All proceeds benefit the education programs of Keep Sevier Beautiful
Start Time: 08:00
Date: 2012-04-14

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The award, which includes a scholarship for professional development, will allow Ballard to spend the summer collaborating with Professor Mike McKinney, director of environmental studies in UT’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. They will study the mechanics of composting and recycling. Ballard plans to implement composting and recycling programs at her school this fall to use as educational vehicles for teaching environmental science.

Seymour Middle School teacher Michele Ballard and UT Professor Mike McKinney study the mechanics of composting.

Now in its fourth year, the Marian E. Oates Teacher Enrichment Award provides outstanding East Tennessee middle-school science teachers opportunities to make new discoveries in the environmental sciences so they can impart their knowledge to students and ensure others continue advocating for environmental conservation.

Throughout her life, UT Knoxville alumna Marian E. Oates championed the stewardship and conservation of natural resources. She lived on Bluff Mountain in Sevier County and aggressively campaigned to restore the area’s ecosystem. When she died, she donated her 510-acre back yard as permanent easement to the Foothills Land Conservatory, ensuring the east end of the Chilhowee Mountains would remain untouched.

Oates, who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in mathematics from UT Knoxville and subsequently served on the Dean’s Advisory Board for the College of Arts and Sciences, established the Marian E. Oates Teacher Enrichment Award as a gift to the College of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

“Now and in the future, the study and practice of environmental sciences are going to become more and more important,” Oates said when announcing the gift two years before she died. “Through this award, I hope to enable middle school teachers to enrich their knowledge, which will, in turn, equip them to boost their students’ interest in taking care of the natural world.”

Ballard, who was selected from a number of nominees, said she is excited to have this opportunity.

“For many years, I have been talking to my students about composting and recycling as a way of helping the environment, but we never did anything about it,” she said. “It has been a dream of mine to start these programs at my school, but I didn’t know where to begin. With support from the Marian Oates award and instruction from Dr. McKinney, I will now be able to realize this dream.

“Composting is a way to recycle food waste from cafeterias, and it can be used as high quality fertilizer in landscaping and plant and vegetable gardens,” McKinney said. “I have found composting is a great way to promote student involvement and instill a sense of social responsibility in students, a value they will carry with them throughout their lives. The school will benefit from lower costs to landfill its waste and gain an educational ‘laboratory’ for the study of decomposition and recycling.”

Ballard has been a teacher at Seymour Middle School for seventeen years and also serves as a cheer coach and Beta Club sponsor. Ballard earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UT Knoxville and an educational specialist degree from Lincoln Memorial University. This year, she was selected as the Sevier County Schools Middle Grades Teacher of the Year. She is married and has two daughters who are in middle school and high school.

Elizabeth Reed, director of Keep Sevier Beautiful, has been spending a lot of time in the classroom lately. By the end of last week she had visited 65 second-grade classrooms across Sevier County, teaching children about how they can make a difference in the way this county looks and the way its natural resources are protected.

It’s a good program, and Reed deserves praise for being involved in it. If you can get children to be aware of littering problems, pollution and beautification, they might just stay attuned to such an issue as they grow older.

When you have a class filled with 7- and 8-year-old children, you never know what you’ll hear from them or the kinds of questions they’ll ask. Keeps you on your toes, but Reed was ready for almost anything tossed her way during the classroom visits.

In order to make it easier to understand, Reed compared the Earth to their bedrooms to get across the consequences of tossing trash from the car or not keeping the grounds and streams clean. Mothers get upset when their kids maintain a messy bedroom, she said, and it’s the same way with our environment. Kids need to keep their rooms clean, and we all need to do our part to keep the environment clean. We may not share the bedroom, but we do share the Earth.

In Sevier County there is an added incentive to make things look as they should. We attract as many as 13 million visitors a year, and the impression we leave them can linger. Whether it’s courtesy or proper street signs or the look of our roadsides, we all create the impression that sticks with our guests. When you stay in a substandard hotel on your own travels or get treated rudely, you question the citizens or the management of the business. Same with our surroundings, and that’s the point Reed made to the impressionable children.

Youngsters this age are attentive, inquisitive and curious. They are thirsty for knowledge and want to be productive citizens. Their attention span may be limited, but their role in making this a good society doesn’t have to be. Reed understands this, as do the teachers who spend so many hours with the second-graders each school year.

If the children who heard Reed’s presentation can come away with a better understanding of why we need to be careful with the land around us, then we can create a generation ahead that will appreciate the fragile nature of what we have and work hard to preserve it.

Elizabeth Reed, executive director of Keep Sevier Beautiful, reads a story about littering to Terry Terry’s second-grade class at Northview Primary School Wednesday. (Curt Habraken/The Mountain Press) Read more: The Mountain Press - Elizabeth Reed Woman on a mission KSB executive director visits all 65 second grade classrooms in Sevier

By RACHEL OSBORN

Staff Writer

KODAK — By the end of the week Elizabeth Reed, executive director of Keep Sevier Beautiful, will have visited all 65 second-grade classrooms in the county.

Her mission, along with others in the organization, is to educate the students on how they can make a difference in their community.

“If you saw a piece of trash on the ground, what would you do?” she asks Terry Terry’s class at Northview Primary.

“Pick it up!” the class yells in response.

“That’s right,” says Reed. “And then throw it away or recycle it.”

One student found littering extremely upsetting. “Trash everywhere is bad for the Earth,” she says.

But, Reed wanted to make sure students understood that litterers aren’t always bad people. “They didn’t put it there to be mean or evil,” says Reed. “They just don’t know any better.”

To explain littering in a way that the kids would understand, Reed compared the Earth to their bedroom. “You know how your mom gets upset before company comes over and she makes you clean your room,” she says. “Sevier County is one big room. We need to clean it up.”

Driving the point home, Reed stressed how many visit this room (Sevier County) each year. “Thirteen million people come to our room,” she says. “Our room is really cool. We need to keep our room clean to keep it cool.”

Following her educational lesson, Reed read a story to the class. The book, titled Retrieving with EVIE, follows a puppy through day-to-day life.

EVIE, an acronym for Every Volunteer Is Essential, is unlike other dogs her age. She is extremely interested in retrieving trash, recycling and cleaning up her hometown. EVIE goes to a local river with her family for an afternoon filled with swimming. Instead of enjoying the water, EVIE spends her time cleaning up.

Afterward, the family gets lunch from a fast food restaurant. While in the drive-through EVIE notices someone drop their paper bag out their car window and drive away. Then, on the drive home EVIE sticks her head out the car window to enjoy some fresh air, like most dogs do. She is struck by a cigarette butt flung from the vehicle in front of her. EVIE does whatever she can to clean up her community.

After the book, Reed introduces the campaign’s slogan to the class: three a day, the EVIE way. Then she and the students pledge to help EVIE keep Sevier beautiful. “I promise to do my best to pick up three a day the EVIE way in my room, in my county, in my state, in my country and on the Earth,” Reed recites.

Under this contract, the students promise to pick up three pieces of trash each day. “Can you guys help EVIE?” she asks the class. “It’s not hard. We’re asking for three a day, not 3,333. If every second-grader picks up three a day, our county will be so clean. It will practically be glittering.”

Then Reed passes out educational coloring books, crayons and sunflower seeds for the students to plant. For Terry she has a copy of the book signed by the author and EVIE.

Overall, Reed found the day to be a good experience.

“The second-graders are so awesome,” she says. “Everything is so black and white with them. We have a promise to pick up three a day, the EVIE way.”

Read more: The Mountain Press – Elizabeth Reed Woman on a mission KSB executive director visits all 65 second grade classrooms in Sevier