Pennies for Primates: Franklin County High School students lending a hand
FCHS Social Studies department chair Judy DeLap-Little poses with just a handful of students who contributed to her classes’ recent ‘Pennies for Primates’ fundraiser. Pictured L to R are Kaitlyn Cox, Judy DeLap-Little, Kaitlyn Grunert, Nathan Dodd, Abby Edwards, Dylan Morris, Christi Bromley and Taylor Cash.
By Nathaniel Smith
Source: Daily American News
Wed Feb 04, 2009
West Frankfort, Ill. – The scientific rubric “If a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, it could cause a tornado in Kansas” has long been used to demonstrate the potential causal effects of the interconnectivity of the delicate systems that maintain the homeostasis, or tendency to seek out equilibrium, of our fragile planet.
Throughout November and December, students in Judy DeLap-Little’s Social Studies classes at Frankfort Community High School have been learning about just such relationships, with a little help from orangutans in Indonesia.
DeLap-Little first learned of the plight of the orangutans, a tree-dwelling species of great apes which shares 97-percent of its DNA with human beings, while reading the November issue of Reader’s Digest. The publication related the tale of orangutans on the islands off Indonesia and Borneo who have found their lives and habitat threatened by a number of factors. Neighboring poachers claim the lives of ‘orangs’ in droves for the resale value of their body parts and offspring on the black market, or simply for a quick meal. Another danger the apes face is the encroaching palm oil industry, whose ever-expanding plantations are fueled by slash and burn techniques wrought upon the apes’ habitat.
“It was such a sad story,” DeLap-Little, a self-proclaimed “animal nut,” said of the tale of the threatened orangutans. “At one point it told of a baby orangutan found crying by the half-eaten corpse of his mother. At another point locals were burning the rain forest to clear land for expanding palm oil plantations and there were literally hundreds of orangutans fleeing the forest on fire, being burned alive. It just tore at your heartstrings. It was just so brutal it struck a chord.”
Lying awake one night, haunted by visions of orphaned orangutans, DeLap-Little came up with a simple plan. “I thought, ‘What can my students and I do to help these poor creatures that will have as little financial impact as possible, particularly in these trying economic times?’”
From the following day and through the Christmas holiday, DeLap and her students collected pennies for Indonesia’s great apes. Not expecting a tremendous influx of copper coinage, DeLap-Little set a low hurdle for her class’s ‘Pennies for Primates’ project. “I thought, if we can collect, maybe thirty or forty dollars by Christmas, that won’t be too bad,” she told the Daily American Tuesday afternoon. “But the whole thing just kind of snowballed.”
Did it ever. Her students, over 100 of them, all decided to pitch in. Some marked the progress of the project on a thermometer-style meter often seen in conjunction with Salvation Army and other fundraisers that generally take place around the holidays. As the number of pennies collected grew, the students encourage the FCHS Social Studies Chair to aim higher. And so a new goal, $100, was set.
“I was absolutely amazed,” she told the Daily American of the outpouring of good will on the part of her students. “In about a month they brought in over $105, and the pennies were still coming in. It floored me. But if each student only brings in two or three pennies – multiply that by about 160 kids – and it adds up pretty quickly.”
But the students took it upon themselves that more than one-cent pieces were brought in to aid the great apes. “They brought in quarters, nickels, dimes,” said DeLap-Little. “Some of the kids emptied out their piggy banks, bringing in big Ziplock bags full of coins and emptying them into the collection jar.”
Through the Reader’s Digest website DeLap-Little and her students were redirected to redapes.org, the site an orangutan outreach program which, among many other lofty goals, seeks to give homes to orphaned orangs and teach them, as a mother would, to forage, climb and live as normal a life as possible.
Through redapes.org, DeLap-Little and her students plan to “Adopt an Orangutan,” in effect sponsoring the life of one young ape in particular for a full year.
Along the way, her students learned an important lesson about the varying lifestyles of people from around the globe and the way in which preserving the natural habitat of orangutans in Indonesia and Borneo could conceivably have a global impact.
“It helped raise an awareness in them of the social aspect,” the veteran educator related. “The reasons that palm oil isn’t used in the United States for cooking as much anymore, though it is an important ingredient in many hand creams and moisturizing lotions. But more importantly they learned that the deforestation required for these palm oil plantations to thrive could potentially result in a depletion of the ozone layer, rising global temperatures and possibly weather-related catastrophes.”
But, at the same time, it seems as though DeLap-Little may have learned an equally important lesson about the next generation of West Frankfort’s citizenry.
“We’ve collected for animals in the past for extra credit,” she added. “Twice we’ve taken in donations of animal supplies and donated them to the Franklin County Animal Shelter for extra credit. But they didn’t get any extra credit for this. They did it out of the goodness of their own hearts. They did a good job and I’m really proud of all of them.”
Which brings a new rubric into the picture. If 160 students in West Frankfort save up enough pennies, could it save the life of an orangutan in Indonesia?”
