ORIGINALLY WRITTEN DON RATZLAFF
There’s nothing like going out a winner. Sonya Roberts completed a five-year teaching stint at Peabody-Burns High School this past academic year as the adviser for the school’s five-member Envirothon team that won the state championship and then competed in the international contest in Canada this summer.
Although Roberts downplays her personal contributions to the unprecedented success of the team, the accomplishment was deemed significant enough to earn Roberts the Marion County Soil Conservation District teaching award for 2007.
“I don’t know if I’m the right person they should be recognizing,” Roberts said. “But I’m really proud of the boys. They really did a good job. They put their heart and soul into it.”
The Envirothon program covers five areas of environmental knowledge: soils, forestry, wildlife, aquatics and an annual environmental “hot topic.”
The first level of competition is county-wide. The winning team moves on to state, and the team that takes first there moves on to the international contest, which this past year was held in Winnipeg, Man.
At state, the format includes taking notes during morning class sessions on each of the five topic areas, and then taking tests on those topics in the afternoon.
“There’s a lot of outside work involved,” Roberts said. “The kids go through a lot of reading materials, review Web sites, and do a lot of research. It takes a lot of self-determination.”
When Roberts first came to Peabody-Burns to teach agriculture classes, she didn’t know anything about the program.
“Envirothon was definitely something I walked into when I went to Peabody,” she said. “Teaching in the field of agriculture, you don’t always teach the same things at every high school you go to.”
Peabody-Burns had developed its Envirothon program in the years before Roberts arrived.
“I had never heard of Envirothon,” she said. “My dad had participated in it as an ag teacher, so he kind of introduced me to what was involved. I guess I was kind of taught by the students what I needed to do to train the team.”
Members of last year’s team were Derek Benson, Jason Unruh, Ben Jantzen, Ryan Wiebe and Duane Unruh.
“They were a really good group of boys,” Roberts said. “There were two on the team I would say were the motivators and the dedicated ones, and would motivate the rest of the group and pump them up.”
Roberts said last year’s team had set its sights high after failing to qualify for state competition the previous year-the only time during Roberts’ stint that Peabody-Burns hadn’t made it to state.
The team breezed through the county competition last spring, then dominated the state contest too, winning medals in all five topic areas, including three first-place medals.
“If you medal in two or three areas, I would consider you pretty competitive,” Roberts said. “After they got their third medal, they knew they were going to win.
“It was so cool because they were all smiles from ear to ear,” Roberts said. “They tried to keep their composure and be good sports, but we really wanted to win. We wanted to go to Canada because the international contest is in Canada only once every five years. Everybody wants to win that year.”
Roberts said the international contest takes competition to a whole new level. While the program at Peabody-Burns is extracurricular and voluntary, she discovered that many schools actively recruit the best and brightest students as team members and then train them in a classroom environment.
Despite its relative disadvantage, the Peabody-Burns team finished a respectable 24th out of 52 teams.
“I was very pleased with them,” she said. “They were a little disappointed because they thought they had done a little better than that. But it’s hard.”
Roberts said her biggest challenge as adviser was preparing the team between the end of the school year in May and the contest in July. She recruited a man with significant Envirothon experience from Great Bend to meet with the team every other week for training sessions in Newton.
Other than that, she credits team members for taking charge of their preparation.
“I tell everybody I was more or less kind of the bus driver,” she said with a laugh. “They were all FFA members, and being their adviser, I took them to FFA competitions-and I helped them find the resources they needed (to study).”
Even though Envirothon isn’t part of the agriculture tradition at Hillsboro High School, where Roberts now teaches, her five years in the program at Peabody-Burns has made her more aware of the need to conserve and protect natural resources.
“I have learned so much about the environment just being involved in Envirothon, and how things affect different things,” Roberts said.
“On the soil side of it, we’re all concerned about conserving our soil. It’s what grows our crops and feeds our nation. The kids need to know the importance of good soil conservation, what it takes to grow crops and those kind of things.
“A lot of things I’ve learned in the Envirothon I’ve been able to use in my wildlife classes (at HHS), and how we need to preserve habitat.”
Her exposure has also raised her general awareness of environmental issues.
“When I drove to Junction City about three weeks ago for a conference, I saw how the city is growing,” she added. “The first thing that came to mind was how many wildlife habitats had been torn up to build new houses. What happened to those animals?
“I just never thought of that aspect until I became involved in this.”
Roberts said while she’s not sure she deserves the conservation district’s teaching award, she’s honored to receive it.
“I really appreciate (the conservation district) acknowledging me for doing this, but most of all I appreciate everything they did for my kids to get them to be able to go to Canada.”
Roberts said Betty Richmond, district manager who organizes the county-wide contest each year, recruited several sponsors to help cover the expenses of the trip north.
“There was no way the school could have covered the entire expense,” Roberts said.
