For 25 years Kenai Peninsula students have been addressing local environmental issues through a program that rewards their creative ideas. Now Caring for the Kenai practices are going national.
Caring for the Kenai creator Merrill Sikorski says after a request from Unocal to redefine oil companies in the community, he realized his original pitch about “Waste Busters” was losing interest.
Sikorski: “I threw out the idea of ‘Or we can go into high schools with a program that would ask kids what they think they could do to improve the environment.’ Steve Weiss, who was the manager of Unocal oil and gas at that time said, ‘I like that, let’s do that’.”
He said that’s when the idea turned into the community project that Caring for the Kenai is today.
Sikorski: “Everybody has had input. Paul Epperson who was the head of curriculum, said we need a real world experience in the schools, that was his idea, we implemented it. Rick Frederick said this needs to be an assignment, so we developed it so it would be a curriculum. Everybody in the community over last 25 years has participated. It is representative of the community.”
The curriculum for high school students is now licensed and available nationwide for school districts to use.
Sikorski: “Caring for the Columbia, Caring for Brooklyn, they’ve got a garbage problem. The environment is everywhere there are people, and you have youth everywhere you have people. Young people may have ideas that we may not have though of, that will save our planet, that will make it so that other generations can have it. It’s a thinking process.”
Sikorski says Caring for the Kenai is currently working with school districts in New York and Washington to implement the program.