Adventure and learning opportunities abound for USD 257 students this summer.
In 2013, SAFE BASE took 68 students and an assortment of adults on a trip to Colorado, offering hiking and whitewater rafting. A little over a decade later, they are taking another big outdoors trip. This time to western Kansas, to explore fossils.
SAFE BASE (Student Activities, Fun and Education, Before and After School and Evenings) is a free summer program that offers students an opportunity to have fun and continue to learn through hands-on activities. Any student who lives in USD 257 from kindergarten through eighth grade can attend, including home-schooled students.
“The district very generously gave us funds for the summer program,” said Angela Henry, SAFE BASE director. “I’m proposing that we take those funds and do another camping trip.”
Henry proposed to USD 257 board members at Monday evening’s meeting that SAFE BASE host a camping trip during its three-week summer program this year. The first two weeks would be a kindergarten through eighth grade program held at Iola Elementary School from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., with a field trip each week. The destinations of these trips have not yet been determined.
“The third week would be for 45 students, third through eighth grade, who have registered for this camping trip in western Kansas,” explained Henry. The trip would also include 15 chaperones.
STUDENTS will leave Iola Tuesday morning, June 17, and return the evening of Friday, June 20. The first day of activities will include travel to the Strataca Salt Mine in Hutchinson in the early afternoon.
“You go about 650 feet underground at the mine,” said Henry. “The salt that’s there was left when the Permian Sea receded. That’s why we have so much salt in Kansas.”
This portion of the trip will also tie in to a “shark week” program that SAFE BASE has hosted over the last decade. “We study sharks during that week, each year,” explained Henry. “We started exploring how Kansas was actually covered with water two different times in our history.”
Following a couple visits over the years from a paleontologist at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, the shark week program started incorporating other prehistoric marine reptiles and studied their existence in Kansas.
LATER IN the day Tuesday, students will take a short break at the Lyons courthouse. Henry noted the courthouse is identical to the one Allen County used to have. “We’ll take a little break there and also see the world’s largest salt shaker,” she said.
From Lyons, students will travel to Hays to visit the Sternberg Museum that evening.
“The museum is very excited that we are coming and we are planning on spending the first night of our trip there,” said Henry.
Students will have the opportunity to interact with and watch paleontologist Ian Trevethan clean the fossils of prehistoric marine reptiles while at the museum.
After a night’s rest, the adventure continues on Wednesday, June 18, with a fossil hunting expedition. “The museum has private contracts with local land owners,” said Henry. Trevethan has arranged for the students to have their expedition at a site in Hays where shark teeth have been regularly found.
BACK ON the road, the group will make a stop in Oakley to explore the Fick Fossil & History Museum. That evening, campsites will be set up at Lake Scott State Park in Scott County. Before settling in for the night, the students will visit Monument Rocks — a series of large chalk formations rich in fossils. The formations were the first landmark in Kansas chosen by the U.S. Department of the Interior as a National Natural Landmark.
