Success Stories

17 May 2007 - For the third semester of the Pine Jog Fellowship, I worked with a youth group of 16 third to fifth graders at A.D. Henderson School. I had never worked with such a big group of students all by myself, so I had a lot to learn! More...

17 May 2007 - After a devastating hurricane season, the 4th graders at Calusa Elementary School were heartbroken to find that their very own butterfly garden had been torn to pieces. It was covered in bark, leaves, and completely destroyed. After months of no progress made by the administration, thirty-three 4th graders took the initiative and found the perfect opportunity to create a brand new garden during their Environmental after school program with the Pine Jog Fellows. The students were motivated and excited, which pushed them to work extra hard on making the new garden perfect. More...

17 May 2007 - Our youth group consisted of twenty-one third, fourth, and fifth graders at Del Prado Elementary. All of our kids going into the program were already very environmentally conscious and aware of many issues in their community and school. However, as we began to examine their school, they realized that much could be improved. We started off by educating our kids on each of the four suggested project areas: Energy, Waste/Recycling, School Grounds, and School Transportation. After dot-voting it became overwhelmingly clear that the students were angry about the state of their nature trail and wanted to fix it, as the School Grounds category was the clear winner. When everyone began looking into the history of the nature trail at Del Prado, we discovered that there had been nature trail cleanups, but it was neglected over the past 5 years due to hurricanes and lack of enthusiasm. There also had been many attempts to start something like the Earth Force Club to clean up the trail, but nothing was accomplished. We also discovered that there was an unused wetland area that was neglected which could be valuable to both students and teachers. The Earth Force Club then made it their mission to reduce the amount of trash on the nature trail, increase the use of the trail by students and teachers, and restore the wetland area out on the trail for student use. More...

17 May 2007 - The project of choice for our group at Florence Fuller ended up being to cultivate a native garden. Be it for the possibility of attracting the likes of butterflies and ladybugs or the sheer beauty of some of the plants and flowers, this one project had the children excited from the very beginning. More...

17 May 2007 - For our third semester project we decided to work with the students in the after-school program of Florence Fuller West. Our group consisted of 16 students in grades 3 through 5. We met with our students for a total of 21 hours between the months of January and March. After spending multiple sessions educating our students about environmental issues and concerns, they voted upon making a butterfly and bird garden as their Earth Force project. Although many sessions were spent working on our garden, we also spent a lot of time doing environmental related art projects and small-scale projects for the students to take home and enjoy. More...

17 May 2007 - The kids and I at Jupiter Farms Community Elementary school have really enjoyed participating in the Earth Force Project over the semester. It gave us all a chance to lengthen and increase our knowledge about the environment. The kids all started out with their own goals. More...

17 May 2007 - In January 2007 the Earth Force club was created at Lighthouse Elementary School in Jupiter, FL. The club consisted of about 15 first grade students from the school’s after-care program. The group first investigated some environmental issues of the community, and later brainstormed a project that would be beneficial to both their school and the earth. More...

17 May 2007 - Our project goal for Earth Force was to provide our students with the information and resources to identify environmental issues in their community, propose solutions to those problems, and work together to decide and work on one of the solutions. For our particular group, we decided to renovate a nearby run-down plot of land and turn it into a native butterfly garden. After further research, we decided to expand the garden’s purpose to other fauna, including hummingbirds with firecracker plants and other types of birds with a bird bath. More...

17 May 2007 - Our first decision as a group was choosing our youth group. After intense research we decided that Omni Middle School was the best place for our Earth Force program because of the excellent academic achievement and the behavior of the students. Following our introduction of Earth Force at our first meeting we explained to the students each of the four project topics; energy, waste and recycling, school grounds, and transportation. We then created many activities for the students, to help them narrow down which topic they wanted to use for our project. After a couple weeks of concentrated activities on each topic, the students voted. The final vote affirmed that the students’ main interest was recycling and waste. More...

17 May 2007 - I worked with a group of 18 fourth graders at Summit Christian School. Together we learned more about the environment, and then discussed issues we might address on the school campus. They came up with things like building a garden, protecting cypress trees from runoff, and catching and getting feral cats fixed. The cat project was shot down, though the kids were excited about it, because it was too dangerous. In the end, they decided to plant a garden. More...

17 May 2007 - This purpose of this project was to teach students about recycling and composting certain waste materials. Last year another fellow initiated a recycling program at the Benjamin Middle and Lower School, this project aimed to continue that work and take it one step further with composting. More...

17 May 2007 - Instead of having a traditional youth group, for my project I went out to various underprivileged elementary schools and after-school organizations to teach a curriculum on water conservation. I did this in conjunction with Pine Jog graduate students, and I went out to the sites with them and assisted. More...

5 Feb 2007 - I decided to promote bats publicly to the community as well as to students in K-12 grades so that I could help or start to change the public’s view on bats. I created a brochure, a website to help promote bats, and an activity book which was about eleven pages long. The activity book was also a coloring book and included three coloring pages and eight activities including: connect the dots, a maze, unscramble the word and crossword puzzles. More...

5 Feb 2007 - For our project we decided to initiate our campus, the MacArthur Campus of Florida Atlantic University, in the Campus Climate Challenge. The CCC is a program that connects young people all across the country, and encourages them to win 100% clean energy policies for their schools. We held several events on campus to increase awareness about energy conservation, and encourage students, faculty, and staff to help decrease the amount of energy we use on this campus. More...

5 Feb 2007 - The goal of my project was to increase participation in the CSA program of Palm Beach County. There were various paths I could take: increase community participation, increase farmer participation, or increase both. More...

5 Feb 2007 - Our project's goal was to raise awareness in our community of the complications resulting from feeding waterfowl. More...

5 Feb 2007 - The goal of our project was to stop the release of these exotic pets into our natural environment. Our strategies for doing this were to create an informational pamphlet to hand out to customers at pet stores informing them about the dangers that releasing exotic pets poses to our environment, distribute stickers with the website to be placed on animal cages with the slogan "Before You Free A Pet, Find A Home", and constructing a website as an informational resource and forum for people to meet about adopting exotic pets. More...

5 Feb 2007 - In the world today Global Warming is becoming a more prevalent issue for humans and wildlife. With such a serious problem on the horizon we need to take action to prevent the acceleration of its potentially harmful effects. Our project was designed to do this. More...

5 Feb 2007 - The issue we chose for our Pine Jog Fellowship Program project concerns injured animals. We decided to dedicate our project to creating awareness about these helpless and often ignored animals. Most people will not help raccoons, possums, and turtles, and will often ignore cats and dogs. We discovered that in the United States, every eleven point five seconds an animals is killed on the road. It was a frightening statistic, so we decided we wanted to bring awareness about these animals to the general Palm Beach County population. More...

5 Feb 2007 - After long brainstorming sessions, continuous research and various phone calls, the group narrowed their project choices to ink cartridge recycling programs in schools. The goal was to ensure that all area schools had an ink recycling program, and if not, to establish one at that school. More...

5 Feb 2007 - My project was to remove invasive plants at Pine Jog Environmental Education Center and to prevent the spread of exotic invasive plants from local homeowner’s yards. More...

5 Feb 2007 - I chose a plan that involved changing the public’s ideas about native plants. My goal was to change their opinions in the places they would go to buy the flowering exotics they tended to buy. I had to do research on which plants were native, and also which had favorable attributes, like attracting wildlife. To affect the way people thought, I had to tell them which plants were native. At the point that I chose my project, only one out of ten of the plants in local nurseries and garden centers were native. More...

5 Feb 2007 - Project: Bright Idea’s main foci include educating the public about the benefits of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL’s) and having our local community switch out one thousand regular bulbs to CFL’s by December of 2006. In our project, we wanted to change peoples’ energy consumption habits, as well as having them change their views on light bulbs in general. Now, many people are aware of environmentally-friendly options for lighting their homes. We discovered that people were willing to do more than we asked of them. More...

5 Feb 2007 - Living in South Florida and close to the shore, I have always had a great interest in the marine life. My project for the fall semester was to make a difference by helping to reduce the destruction of South Florida’s coral reefs. From the research I conducted it is estimated that the coral reefs in Florida at the National Marine Sanctuary are dying each year at a rate of 10% due to coral killers (Culen, 2006). I found out that most of the damage is caused by people who are not even aware of the damage they are causing. Snorkelers, scuba divers, boaters and even everyday ocean bathers are all contributing to the reefs’ demise. Most of the time people are just not aware of the impact they have. My goal was to motivate and educate others to make a difference and work to change their actions and habits to help reduce their negative impact on the coral reefs. More...

5 Feb 2007 - I wanted to tackle the issue of lack of awareness about natural Florida ecosystems, and I thought that working through the butterfly garden/campus arboretum would be a great way to do that. I found that Alana Edwards was in charge of furthering the progress of the arboretum, and after speaking with her a couple times, I was on board with her as a volunteer. I was excited to teach people about what was happening with the green space on our campus and getting more students and faculty involved in maintaining and using it during these early stages. More...

5 Feb 2007 - The issues we chose to address were urban sprawl and encroachment into natural areas, as well as development without smart planning. Under the current laws, land use plans can be changed on a whim by city commissioners who at many times side with land developers instead of the community. Given the astronomical growth of Florida, such unchecked development would be harmful to both the environment and to its human inhabitants. More...