"WHALES FOR KIDS" PROGRAM: PART OF OUR CHAPTER'S PAST - AND FUTURE?
By Jo Guerrero- in the hope that there may be individuals with an interest in reviving - and expanding! - that original project, and
- to pay tribute to the very active Board of Directors during those years (including Mary Rodriguez), who whole-heartedly supported it.
Fortunately, the AT&T Pro-Am Youth Fund, Monterey Sportfishing and the Alisal School District thought so too. In both years, AT&T funded our chapter so that we could pay for several classes to take gray whale watching boat trips offered by Monterey Sportfishing at a discounted price. Alisal School District staff were very supportive: administrators quickly identified classes from Alisal schools receiving Chapter 1 federal funding (due to the high percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students in attendance), and along with classroom teachers, they then successfully finagled bus time and coordinated school and bus schedules to transport the kids.
Meanwhile, board members trained several volunteer ACS members as gray whale naturalists. These volunteers presented multimedia classroom programs to each class, and a day or two later met students, teachers and parent chaperones at Monterey Fisherman's Wharf to spend two hours whale-watching on the Bay.
The program was a great success, evidenced not only by the huge grins and shouts of excitement from the students on board, but also by the increased funding provided by AT&T Youth Fund the second year, allowing us to work with even more classes in the Alisal District.
I believe the biggest, maybe only, reason that the program hasn't continued to this day is that the ACS coordinator for the classrooms, naturalists, and boat trips really needed to be a paid staff person - or someone who could afford the time to volunteer many, many hours during November through January of each year. I sincerely hope one of these scenarios come true, because all young kids deserve chances like this. And what better place and time to make it happen than Monterey Bay of the new millennium, which now hosts more migrating grays than have visited our coast in more than a century.
Illustration by Robert Western