By james art 
Earlier this year, educators from Calvert County Public Schools’ CHESPAX Environmental Education Program received a $2,000 grant for their Schoolhouse Rocks: Saving the Chesapeake’s Oysters project.
The group thought it would receive the grant on Oct. 31 during an outdoor ceremony at Mutual Elementary School.
However, it was an oyster that had a pearl worth an additional $25,000 from Voya Financial.
According to Sarala Kata, a Voya representative, the company recognizes the local oyster project as an “interactive approach to environmental education.”
Voya, a 33-year-old financial, retirement, investment and insurance company based in New York that provides retirement plans for educators, selected the CHESPAX program from nearly 400 applications submitted nationwide.
Kata told the audience that Voya’s grant program was launched in the late 1990s as a means of recognizing “an idea that brings a program to life.”
The four faculty members recognized are Thomas Harten, an environmental science teacher, Linda Subda, Jenna Lyons and Jesse Howe, who is the assistant director of the Coastal Conservancy Association.
“Calvert County is blessed to have so many resources,” Harten said, adding that the awarded money will be applied to CHESPAX programs.
“We couldn’t do this without our association with CHESPAX,” Howe said of his organization’s Living Reef Action Campaign.
In a summary of the teaching idea that the company believes is the best in the nation, Voya officials wrote the team’s teaching idea “to engage fifth graders to improve the community ecosystem. The project focuses on preserving the ecological role of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay through a Living Reef Action Campaign.”
The description continues: “Perhaps no other species is more important to the bay than the oyster. Oyster reefs were once so abundant in the bay that ships had to go around them. Today, these reefs are less than 3% of their historic levels in the Chesapeake Bay Working with the Coastal Conservation Association, students will build 250-pound oyster reef balls at their schools and deploy them to restoration sites in Maryland.
Subda, who, like Harten, has been with the CHESPAX program since the early 1990s, told the Southern Maryland News that all fifth-graders at Calvert Public Elementary Schools have had or will have an opportunity to experience the Schoolhouse Rocks project. She added that the level of enthusiasm to date has been across the board at participating schools.
So how do fifth graders pull off a project involving industrial components like metal and cement?
“They all work together,” Stephanie Patterson, CHESPAX secretary, told the Southern Maryland News, adding that students work in groups of four. “I really enjoy watching these kids. They work so hard.
After the cement hardens, which usually takes two or three days, the reef balls are trucked in and subsequently placed in the bay.
With each school producing 20 oyster reef balls during the program, the result will be 5,000 pounds of artificial reef habitat.
“The project will enable students to make a tangible, ecological impact on oyster populations,” Voya officials said in a release before the Oct. 31 ceremony.