“I never knew you could do that!”
“I never heard of you.”
“You can get paid for doing that?”
These are some of the things our Copper Basin juniors and seniors said to the presenters at the Winkelman Natural Resource Conservation District’s (WNRCD) first Natural Resources Career Day, held last Thursday at the Dudleyville Intergenerational Center.
Three districts sent their upper classmen to meet with folks from the Bureau of Land Management, ASARCO, U.S. Forest Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service and, Arizona Conservation Corp. Each school came in at different times and met with these representatives to learn what careers are out there that they had, mostly, never heard of. It was also a learning experience for the schools’ teachers and administrators accompanying the students.
The WNRCD had long wanted to conduct one of these career days but until it hired Jonah Cude as its Education Center manager there wasn’t anyone in the District who had the time to organize it. In all, over 100 students were exposed to a whole new career path they never knew existed.
After each school finished with this exposure, they traveled the short distance to the WNRCD Education Center farm to see, firsthand, what is going on there and an offer to the schools to use it as a resource and an outdoor classroom.