Note: This commendation accompanied the Kansas Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Conservationist award to Alice Potts in 1994.
Alice Potts has involved herself in Environmental/Conservation Education for nearly twenty years. She has been trained in numerous environmental education work-shops, including Investigating Your Environment (KACEE Workshop), Project Learning Tree, Project Wild, and Project Wild Aquatic. She has modified many of the activities from workshops she has attended, and implemented them with her students. Her classroom is a menagerie of animals, in which the students study their natural history and behavior. Her year with her students include field trips, which range from school yard studies, to aquatic and riparian studies of the Arkansas River, to visits to natural history museums, to geology field trips that range as far as Butler County. She exudes an excitement about the natural world that infects not only her students, but her colleagues as well. In addition to her school year assignment, she has taught natural history to elementary students in the Wichita Schools summer program.
Alice grew up on a farm just west of Aliceville in Coffey County. She received her Bachelors and Master’s degrees in Elementary Education from Pittsburg State University. She has earned nearly sixty additional graduate hours from Wichita State University and Friends University.
Mrs. Potts taught second grade in Wichita for over 23 years, stopping for a time to mother her children when they were young. Her areas of specialty are Language Arts, Science, and Math.
In the spring of 1993 Mrs. Potts took her second graders on a field trip to the natural history museum at the Sedgwick County Department of Environmental Management resulting in a project that impacted students throughout the state. The students became enamored with the colorful Barred Tiger Salamander. Upon returning to the classroom, they discussed this amphibian and discovered that Kansas did not have a State Amphibian. They studied the natural history of the animal and contacted several experts. They learned that the Barred Tiger Salamander lived throughout most of the state, was beneficial to the environment, and that its striking colors were the Kansas colors. They wrote to the Sedgwick County legislators later that spring proposing that the Barred Tiger Salamander be nominated for State Amphibian, and were assured by many that they would support the idea.
In the fall of 1993 the students, teachers and parents at OK Elementary adopted the “B.T. Salamander for State Amphibian” campaign as their school project for the 1993-94 school year. Alice Potts was selected as project director. Through her leadership, every elementary school in Kansas was contacted and invited to participate in the campaign by encouraging students to learn about the Barred Tiger Salamander, and then write their legislators and the governor. More than 5000 students from more than 100 schools in 80 Kansas School Districts participated. In March of 1994 both the Kansas House and Senate approved the bill. On April 13, 1994 at a “signing party” at Cedar Crest, Governor Joan Finney signed the Barred Tiger Salamander Bill into law. Nearly 1000 students from throughout the state were in attendance. Alice Potts received the Certificate of Recognition for outstanding performance and exceptional contribution to the State of Kansas from Governor Finney.
Alice Potts has been a long-time member of numerous national, state and local professional organizations. For her considerable talents as a classroom teacher, she has been nominated for the 1995 Golden Apple Award.
Alice Rolf Potts’ involvement with students in environmental/conservation education activities has enriched their lives. Because of her efforts… her present and former students, and many of her colleagues, are more conscious of the natural world and the need to conserve it. For her many contributions to conservation Alice was chosen as KWF’s 1994 Wildlife Conservation of the Year.