Students 'adopt' Wolf Conservation Center
Students at John Jay Middle School will soon be taking back their world, by helping the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem to raise and breed endangered wolves.
The Wolf Conservation Center was chosen after students listened to a presentation for Take Back Our World, a project organized by the Center for SCREEN-TIME Awareness, which also organizes the annual TV Turnoff Week. Representatives from five local nonprofit organizations — The Friends of Karen, Camp Sunshine, March of Dimes, Operation Smile, and the Wolf Conservation Center — addressed the students during an assembly on Thursday, Jan. 17.
After the assembly, students, teachers and parents had the opportunity to vote on which nonprofit the school as a whole would support. Although the voting was close, the Wolf Conservation Center narrowly beat out Operation Smile, a charity that provides cleft palate and cleft lip surgeries to children in 25 countries around the world.
Now that the charity has been chosen, the school is having Maggie Howell, managing director of the center, come in to give a live information session over the school’s TV studio. The center will also set aside weekends for middle school families.
“We really want to get the kids involved physically, and to have them understand what it means to support a cause to make the world a better place,” said Susan Dillon, the teacher who organized the event. “We are planning to take the kids there to learn about the wolves” and to help by clearing trails and doing other work.
For at least the next four months, the students will work with the Wolf Conservation Center. At the end of April, the Center for SCREEN-TIME Awareness will judge all the entries and choose one middle school and one high school that have “had the greatest impact on their community.” The winners will be presented with the first annual United in Service Award.
More information: screentime.org.
