Grant Provides Audubon Kits for Elementary Students
April 2006

Audubon Kits for Children are Provided South Shore Foundation Chairman Jodie Elizabeth Jeffrey (left) with Kenya, the African Gray parrot, meet with Marg Bangert, local Audubon Adventures project chairman, to announce a grant of $2,697 for Audubon Adventures kits for 64 classrooms in area schools next school year. The schools receiving environmental education kits are in Marion and Boone counties where NATCO provides telephone services. NATCO is the parent company of the South Shore Foundation.

Elementary students in six area schools will once again receive environmental education materials prepared by the National Audubon Society next school year. A grant of $2,697 from the South Shore Foundation to the Audubon Society of North Central Arkansas will finance the continuing project in Bergman, Flippin, Lead Hill, Yellville-Summit, Omaha, and Bruno-Pyatt schools.

Marg Bangert of Midway chairs the project for the local Audubon Society, and South Shore Foundation is the charitable organization of NATCO at Flippin.

Ms. Bangert told the foundation directors, “Audubon Adventures is a tool to teach children the importance of taking care of our environment and all of nature within it.”

She added that in 2005, natural disasters in the world had changed or eliminated many ecosystems, yet the discovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in south Arkansas, previously thought to have been extinct, was possible because its habitat had been preserved.

Jodie Elizabeth Jeffrey, chairman of the Foundation, said the directors of the foundation are pleased to help keep Audubon Adventures coming to the South Shore area schools, noting that environmental preservation is one of the stated goals of its charitable activity.

Sixty-four classrooms of students in third through sixth grades receive the Classroom and Individual kits, which present basic, scientifically accurate facts about birds, wildlife, and their habitats, said the Audubon Society. Topics the students studied this year in the Audubon Adventures kits were: The Nature of Spiders, Turtles - Armored Reptiles, Dragonflies and Damselflies, and The Watery World of Waterbirds.

The Audubon Society of North Central Arkansas welcomes all persons interested in birds and their habitat, she said. The group meets the second Monday of each month at 1 p.m. at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Mountain Home.

For more information about the South Shore Foundation, call 1-888-774-6731. The foundation’s parent company is NATCO, an independent telecommunications company family owned since 1951, providing telephone service to six exchanges: Bull Shoals, Diamond City, Flippin, Lead Hill, Omaha and Pyatt.