Homer Alaska - Schools

Sheryl Sotelo, sixth-grade teacher at McNeil Canyon Elementary School, is starting the school year with some extra change for class projects. Sotelo is one of 100 educators across the nation to receive a $2,000 "Unsung Heroes" grant from the ING Foundation.

ING is a global financial institution offering banking, investments, life insurance and retirement services. As ING's charitable arm, the foundation awards grants supporting community needs and resources.

"By receiving the ING Unsung Heroes award, Sotelo is recognized as one of the nation's most innovative educators," ING announced in an August press release.

The grant will help fund "Project Alaskan Action: Citizen Science," multiple scientific projects in which Sotelo's students will participate during the school year. Recently, the students were involved in European green crab monitoring. This week they planned to spend three days at the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies' Peterson Bay field station. The middle of the month, the sixth-graders will do an invasive weed pull with representatives of the Alaska Soil and Water Conservation District. At the end of the month, they will do water quality sampling and biological monitoring of Beaver Creek, a salmon stream, with the help of personnel from Cook Inletkeeper and the Kenai Watershed Forum.

The grant also will help Sotelo and her class expand a project from the 2009-2010 school year in which students built underwater robots and tested their ability to remotely maneuver the robots at the Kate Kuhns Aquatic Center. That project was done with the help of Kris Holderied, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's director of the Kasitsna Bay Lab, and Mike Byerly of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

"This (grant) will pay for the underwater cameras and maybe even some of our own equipment," said Sotelo.

"Project Alaskan Action" also involves other McNeil students. For instance, the entire student body is cleaning up marine debris as part of CoastWalk.

"And the older kids are doing some presentations with younger students to involve them even more," said Sotelo of teaching done by her sixth-graders.

As an "Unsung Heroes" recipient, Sotelo is in the running for one of ING Foundation's three top prizes: an additional $5,000, $10,000 or $25,000.

In June, Sotelo attended the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, where she and Anne Briggs, an educator at Margate Elementary School in Margate, Tasmania, were selected to present a project their classes had collaborated on during the 2008-2009 school year. Through "Poles Apart — Ice E-Mystery and Seasons and Biomes Projects," Sotelo and Briggs's students were paired in a project based on polar science. They were one of 12 such pairings between Alaska and Australian schools.

The project was sponsored by the Australian government, the National Science Foundation (USA), the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Tasmania and the education departments of Tasmania, Queensland and Alaska. It gave students an opportunity to research wildlife, climate, culture and history, sharpen their writing skills, and communicate using e-mail, Skype and the postal service.

Sotelo is part of a teaching team at McNeil in which Principal Pete Swanson takes pride.

"One of the things I've tried to facilitate is their passions," said Swanson. "I believe people do better when they're doing things they love to do."

Through her contacts, Sotelo has seen a passion for science shared between generations of scientists.

"Retiring scientists are passing along the link between education and science, and these early-career scientists are willing to work with educators on projects," she said.

That same relationship is developing locally.

"The McNeil students are really the unsung heroes in this project as they are serving as citizen scientists and really contributing to a local data base through their stewardship and monitoring efforts," said Sotelo.

"Catie Bursch (of Kachemak Bay Research Reserve) was the one who told the students that they didn't need a PhD for doing the science involved in the green crab monitoring. Science is accessible to everyone and if you have curiosity you can be a scientist. I thought that was great for the students to hear."

The writing done by Sotelo and Briggs' students, "Journey Through the Polar Lands," can be read on the Web at iem.tmag.tas.gov.au.

For more on the International Polar Year-Oslo Science Conference, see the web at ipy-osc.no/.