Keeping pets in classrooms can be a tradition, but students in a third-grade class at Pierce Elementary School in Bennington have been taking it to another level throughout the school year, and were scheduled to be featured on the New Hampshire PBS show “Windows to the Wild” for their hard work.
Jenn Sutton’s third-graders have been raising four hatchling turtles, but they’re not pets; the turtles will be released into the wild come May.
“They’re basically doing scientific research,” said Principal Beth Gibney. “The kids are so knowledgeable if you talk to them about it, it’s really fascinating to see how much they’ve taken in and how engaging it is.”
The project came about in conjunction with the Harris Center, which has been working on the program to take care of hatchling turtles based on a successful turtle head-starting program from Zoo New England and similar work across the nation.
“Many turtles are endangered or imperiled, and a pinch point for them, where they get most imperiled, is when they’re in the egg,” said Susie Spikol, who works at the Harris Center and helped get Pierce’s program running.
The eggs are vulnerable to coyotes, birds of prey, dogs and many other animals, and even if the turtles make it to hatching, brand-new baby turtles will often be at risk of being eaten as well.
“Lots of turtles get eaten this way, and because there’s less and less turtle habitat, it can affect the whole population,” Spikol said.
Head-starting programs allow endangered turtles time to be raised to the point where they stand a better chance in the wild, and then they are released back to where they came from. New Hampshire doesn’t have a program in place for endangered turtle species; what’s happening now is practice, with painted turtles.
“We’re practicing, to learn how to do it in the hopes that when the State of New Hampshire is ready and gets the funding to do something like this, we will have the infrastructure in place to be able to provide that for them,” said Spikol.
The Harris Center has not been alone in this work, Spikol added. It has been working with New Hampshire Fish & Game’s Nongame and Endangered Wildlife Program, as well as naturalist and author Sy Montgomery and wildlife artist Matt Patterson, who are collaborating on a book about turtles.
The Pierce program started last year, but due to COVID-19 and largely remote schooling, the turtles were not put into classrooms until this year. Pierce is not the only school in the region participating, as there are turtles at Peterborough Elementary School, the Well School, ConVal High School and Jaffrey Grade School.
PBS came only to Pierce, though. In the fall, a cameraman came into Sutton’s class and filmed a lesson on the turtles, as well as the turtles themselves. Before the scheduled airing Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m., Gibney held a mini-premiere for the class on Tuesday, where she presented “turtle-tender” awards to the third-graders and Spikol presented on the turtles to the whole school.
According to Sutton, while the turtles have been a fixture in the third-grade classroom, they’ve also been a big part of the year for the entire school.
“We have students in our building who will come down just to read to the turtles, they just want to sit with the turtles and visit,” she said. The whole school also voted on names for the turtles, although her class got the last say on the final names: Flash, Rocky, Penny and Myrtle.
For Sutton, the most-interesting aspect has been how well the turtles can be wrapped into the classroom curriculum.
“It’s a big integrated project, so we don’t just use the turtles for science,” she said. They do math with the turtles, measuring them and calculating data on their growth, and they do reading and writing on the topic of turtles, as well as research and preparing slideshows and art.
“It’s a very holistic experience,” said Gibney.
The use of the turtles to make naturalism interesting was intentional, according to Spikol.
“For this project, we spent a lot of time thinking about what really motivates a child, or a person, to want to love the natural world,” she said. “This really gives kids a chance to feel like they’re making a difference.”
And maybe, she added, some of these students might decide to take their learning to the next level when they grow up.
“This is the point of education, having experiences that can really touch and move a child,” she said. “We need more turtle warriors in the world.”
Sutton said she has seen some of the broader-angle impacts in the classroom as well.
“It’s extremely enriching for the kids, and it feeds my soul,” she said. “I really believe in place-based education and learning about what’s here, I really think that kids will grow up and take care of the land around them and where they grew up if they understand what’s here and they have a connection to it.”
The turtles will be released in May, back to where they came from — an undisclosed, protected location on private property, according to Spikol. Students will not be able to attend, but organizers are hoping to set up a livestream so they can watch.
And moving forward, Spikol said she and the Harris Center hope to continue forward with this program.
“We have the infrastructure, we have some funding for it, and we’re hoping to continue it,” she said.
If it does, it will likely stay with the same teachers, she said, something Sutton and Gibney expressed excitement for.
“I would be willing to continue this, I think the work we’re doing is extremely important,” Sutton said.
“It could be interesting, when that type of tradition starts, to have it be more of a rite of passage,” said Gibney.