Slippery Rock team places first at county Envirothon
A team of students from Slippery Rock High School won the annual Butler County Envirothon Tuesday at Jennings Environmental Education Center. Twenty-four high school teams and nine middle school teams took part.
The Envirothon is designed to give students an opportunity to acquire and demonstrate their knowledge of environmental resources and the interactive relationships between resources and human activities.
The goal of the Envirothon program is to help students become environmentally knowledgeable citizens who are willing to work toward achieving and maintaining an equilibrium between the quality of life and the quality of the environment.
The program emphasizes the importance of environmental sensitivity while stressing a need to achieve a social, ecologic and economic balance.
The students were challenged in forestry, aquatics, wildlife, soils and the current issue was protection of groundwater.
Tests were conducted by personnel from the Bureau of Forestry, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, Butler County Recycling Department and the Butler County Conservation District.
The Slippery Rock High School team is led by teacher Anthony Consbruck.
Two Karns City High School teams took second and third place in the competition.
The Slippery Rock High team will represent Butler County in the state Envirothon competition at PPL Montour Preserve in Danville, Montour County, May 26.
The winner there will represent Pennsylvania in the 23rd annual Cannon Envirothon scheduled Aug. 1 to 6 at the University of California in Fresno, Calif.
Ron Fodor is district manager of the Butler County Conservation District.
