56.0°,
Overcast Seaford students do some spring cleaning
It may have been just five minutes away, but when Seaford Middle School students visited the Tackapausha Museum and Preserve last Thursday, it was like a whole different world.
The seventh-grade class visited the Nassau County park in Seaford on May 7 to clean up the grounds and learn more about nature. About 200 students attended the trip, which science teacher Roseann Zeblisky hopes to make an annual event.
“We talk about this stuff in class,” Zeblisky said, referring to topics such as conservation and animal classification. “Now they have the opportunity to see it and actually start doing it.”
Traditionally, the Seaford Wellness Council has hosted an annual spring clean-up at Tackapausha. This year, the middle school students were the ones who got their hands dirty, with the Wellness Council providing financial support, paying for gloves and transportation.
While at Tackapausha, Zeblisky said it made sense to take advantage of the museum’s other program. In addition to cleaning up the grounds, the students went on scavenger hunt and saw a live animal presentation.
The weather was perfect, Zeblisky said, with sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s. The field trip was also accessible to all students, as the only cost to them was museum admission. Teachers from all different subject areas also attended.
The students split into three groups, with each cleaning up a different area of the park. They found items such as plastic bags, candy wrappers, Styrofoam, and bottles and cans.
“It makes me feel kind of disappointed,” Jess Marcus said, about how much litter was in the park. She added that some of it was next to garbage cans, and she doesn’t understand why people can’t make the extra effort to throw it away.
“I feel like people don’t think to throw out garbage, they just throw it on the ground,” said Katelyn Winter, who added that she felt like she made a difference in her community last week.
Alexandra Walsh and Vinny Tudisco both said that cleaning up the trash would benefit the wildlife at Tackapausha, such as ducks, swans and turtles.
Richie Apollo said he hopes that his classmates will remember this trip for a long time. “It could be a good experience to show younger people that you should not litter when you get older,” he said.
After his group cleaned up around the lake, Tudisco looked around and was proud of their work. “I think it’s much better than it was,” he said, “because there was so much garbage.”
Zeblisky said she hoped the experience would give the students an appreciation for nature, especially a place that is essentially in their own backyard. “If they can appreciate it,” she said, “they’ll start taking care of it.”
