GHS Outdoor Wildlife Learning Site Boardwalk

My name is Brad Cline. I have been a science teacher for 36 years in the Goddard, KS community.

Our school (Goddard High School in Goddard, KS) has a fantastic Outdoor Wildlife Learning Site (OWLS). The site is an outdoor classroom for students to experience and study native grasses of Kansas and the prairie ecosystem. In 1997, a set of volunteers built a boardwalk that spanned the waterway/wetland area in the OWLS site. Over twenty-five years later, the boardwalk has decayed and become a safety hazard to the students and community members who use it. My son Isaac (a current student at Goddard High School) has taken on the renovation of the boardwalk as a community service project in order to restore and improve upon it. His plan is to rebuild and raise the boardwalk off the ground, so water can pass freely under the walkway without restriction. His plan is to make the boardwalk ADA compliant, so students with disabilities can safely traverse it. The cost of this project is large. Though Isaac will secure some help from the school in terms of labor and materials, there is simply not enough money available to bring the walkway to a standard needed to maintain the needs of the students and at the same time preserve the native wetlands around the boardwalk.

The OWLS park is not only an expansion of the GHS science curriculum, but it is also a creative space for art students to study nature and landscapes and a location for other curricula teachers to take students to read and study outdoors.

On behalf of Isaac and the continuation of educational opportunities at the Outdoor Wildlife Learning Site, I invite GHS alumni, Goddard community members, and anyone who enjoys the outdoors, to monetarily support this project. This site is a tremendous asset to our students and the community it supports. We want to keep it growing into a site that is beautiful and useful to all who visit it. Once funding and materials are secured, the renovation will begin in the Spring of 2024.