Kids who participate in SAFE BASE this summer are in for a whale of a time — three days a week in Iola and each Thursday on the road throughout June. Students who’ve just complete kindergarten through eighth grade are eligible.
Director Angela Henry expects about 130 to answer the bell when the first session starts at 8:30 a.m. Monday at Lincoln Elementary School.
“Anyone who isn’t enrolled may do so starting at 8:15 Monday, also in the Lincoln gym,” Henry said. Anyone not enrolled must be accompanied by a parent.
The summer program — the eighth in SAFE BASE’s 11 years — is kid and parent friendly. Out-of-town learning experiences are scheduled each Thursday during the four weeks and parents are encouraged to ride along. Students go free and the only cost to parents will be admission fees, $2 to $8 depending on the event.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings each week will be broken into reading, math, gardening, cooking and physical education activities, with the rotation depending on the day and class levels. Each child will have a schedule.
BRUCE JACOBS, a master garden, will tutor the kids, as he did during the school year, in how to identify plants — vegetable, flowers and weeds — and how to manage a garden plot to the consumer’s advantage.
He gave a brief tour of the Wayne Garrett Children’s Garden, Lincoln and Sycamore streets, earlier this week.
Many of the individual lots, with wooden boundaries, are filled with lush plants and occasional bare soil will be covered with green before long.
Among things he will point out to the youngsters is that such things as depth of planting makes a difference and very quickly is evident. He noted in one plot where half the climbing bean plants were better than a foot tall while the others had just pushed through the soil’s surface.
“Why? Because the ones just coming up were planted too deep,” Jacobs said.
Another plot has several tomato cages with vines a third of the way up.
“By the end of June they’ll be at the top,” he said, and producing succulent fruit.
Raspberry, blackberry and blueberry plants, positioned just inside the garden’s fence, have started to put on berries and will be ready to pluck before long.
SAFE BASE students will harvest vegetables while they are in session. So as not to waste what will continue to grow, anyone who wants will be permitted to take advantage of the garden through the summer.
“We’ll schedule a day for people to come by,” Henry said.
THE FIRST field trip on Thursday will be to Strong City, where students will get a liberal taste of the Old West.
They will see a bison herd, one established from a strain in South Dakota that doesn’t have a smidgen of bovine DNA.
“It’s an absolutely pure herd,” said Henry.
The trip also in part will celebrate Kansas’ 150th birthday and the kids will take a covered wagon ride across the picturesque Flint Hills, “just like the pioneers did,” she added.
Along with the bison and Tallgrass Prairie, students will tour a mansion-like ranch headquarters, see what it would be like to go to have classes in a one-room limestone school and “cowboy-up.”
“They’ll learn how to shoe a horse, rope a calf and watch a real cowboy ride a bucking bronco,” Henry observed.
They’ll not have any beans baked on the range, but, more to their liking, the kids will snack on cookies and lemonade.
June 16 the SAFE BASE road show will take students to the Midland Railway at Baldwin, so they can cruise on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Train No. 142 to Ottawa and back.
“We’re learn about Fred Harvey,” who ran hotels and restaurants along Santa Fe Railroad lines, and “the Harvey girls,” waitresses in the restaurants, Henry said.
“In the afternoon we’ll visit the historic Black Jack Battlefield near Baldwin,” one of the first battlegrounds of the Civil War, she said. “We’ll watch history come alive through actors portraying soldiers and John Brown.”
Brown advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means of abolishing slavery. He was executed for treason in 1859, after an unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, W.V.
The kids will jump into modern times on June 23 when they journey Butler County to see the Elk River Wind Power Project, where 100 wind turbines, each 389 feet tall, generate electricity. In the afternoon they will frolic at the Rock River Rapids Aquatic Park in Augusta, which has a lazy river feature and several slides.
Also that week they will spend time Monday through Wednesday swimming at Iola’s pool, free of charge.
The final trip will be involve ferocious animals, such as lions, tigers and bears, all safely behind bars at Kansas City’s Swope Park Zoo.
ALL ADVENTURES won’t be out-of-town.
Local special activities include such things as setting up a cowboy kitchen on the garden site to learn how to cook breakfast, including mouth-watering biscuits, in a big iron kettle suspended above a fire.
The kids also will make pancakes one day and learn how to make syrup. A part of that exercise will be collecting sap from a tree.
“It’s going to be a fun and educational four weeks,” Henry said.
