Jonesboro, AR – JonesboroRightNow.com – Around 200 grade school students from across Northeast Arkansas gathered on the Arkansas State University campus to celebrate Earth Day and learn about sustainability.

The event, held on the lawn in front of the Reng Student Union, featured several booths where kids could learn about wildlife, sustainability, conservation, and more. It invites schools within a 100-mile radius of A-State to attend, as well as homeschooled kids. It has been held for 15 years.

“It’s fun for the kids to see all the different animals here because it’s not things that they would normally see,” said Dr. Jennifer Bouldin, dean of the Beck College of Science and Mathematics. “If you teach somebody at a young age, how important it is to recycle, how important it is to conserve things, then they’ll take it into their adulthood.”

In addition to the various booths, art displays by students made from recyclable materials were on display on the second floor of the Union. Sponsored by the Keep Jonesboro Beautiful Commission and Unico Bank, the display encouraged students to work with the theme “Our Power, Our Planet.”

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Wynne Primary School second graders Lilly Jacobs and Eleanor Grubbs attended the festival. They both said their favorite booth was the Northeast Arkansas Humane Society’s, which had puppies for students to pet.

“We’ve learned today not to push trash in the ocean, so we can’t pollute the animals and things,” Grubbs said. Jacobs added, “We learned not to litter so we can keep animals safe.”

Anna Paraskevopoulos, who was with the Arkansas Center for Biodiversity Collections, was working at a booth where students could see live insects and learn how they prefer different flowers.

People gather around a brown horse, several kids reaching to pet its neck on a sunny day, with a campus-like building in the background.
Children line up at a blue table with blue dice blocks at an outdoor event in a sunny park.
Group of children gathered around a table outdoors, watching a bearded man in a navy shirt demonstrate with a yellow toolbox on the table.
Group of people under a canopy at an outdoor event, smiling as a dog is petted by a woman holding an orange bottle
Children in colorful shirts line up at an outdoor event, holding red gift bags while a table with a laptop and volunteers is visible nearby.
Group of children at a park science booth examining bones and artifacts on a table under a red canopy amid a sunny outdoor event.
Student in a turquoise shirt holds a snake as others watch on a campus lawn under trees.

Their booth was next to the Red Wolves for Red Wolves, an A-State student organization that advocates for and educates on red wolf conservation. There, students could feel a real red wolf pelt and learn about the animals.

“I think they just really like seeing the specimens and being able to touch things. I think it’s really exciting to have a red wolf pelt out as well as some other study specimens,” Paraskevopoulos said. “Trying to teach students about biodiversity, and all the different organisms, and how they make up each component of the ecosystem, and the overall impact of that is really important.”

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