Kids to the Rescue : Regional contest will give children the chance to find a solution to our environmental problems.

Alan Tratner thinks kids may have the solution to our environmental problems. Last fall he organized a “Young Eco Inventors Contest” in the Bay Area and he’s bringing the event to Ventura County schools.

Tratner, president of the Camarillo-based Inventors Workshop International, started these regional contests complete with cash prizes for 6 to 18 year olds in cooperation with Eco Expo, the annual environmental exposition.

“Their insightful youthful perspective of our environment” made Tratner want to “nurture their astonishing inventive spirit,” he said.

This week, entry forms are being mailed to every public and private school in Ventura County--as well as other Southern California counties--encouraging science teachers to put their students to work on drawings and models. Tratner reports that prior contests produced entries such as “self-cleaning and recycling houses, solar cars, fuel producing garbage trucks and water cleaning machines (that) were ingenious, showed technical acumen and had actual commercial value.”

For 1993, Chrysler Corp. and Apple computers have gotten into the act by providing the top prizes and inducement for the schools to participate. A $1,000 check will be awarded by Chrysler to each winner in the four age groups--6 to 8, 9 to 12, 13 to 15 and 16 to 18. In addition, Apple Computer Systems will give each winner’s school $5,000 worth of equipment. The Times, a co-sponsor of the contest, will begin running announcements containing the entry form this month.

Teachers and kids have only a few weeks to plan and build a model or draw a poster-size rendering of their idea. Then they have to take it in person to the judging location at the spring’s Eco Expo in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Tratner and the Eco Expo folks will be accepting entries there between March 9 and 12. To get an idea of how responsive young people can be to such a competition note the entry rule Tratner had for the San Francisco competition: “Only the first 1,000 entries will be considered for display and judging.” Awards will be announced at Eco Expo on March 14.

Ventura County provides fertile ground for this kind of environmental whiz-kid activity. Just look at Deanna Hackman’s fifth-grade classroom in Thousand Oaks.

Her current science lesson at Weathersfield Elementary School is indicative of what’s going on hereabouts and why she expects her 10 year olds to make a strong showing in the eco-invention contest. She uses environmentally oriented lessons to gain students’ attention--stuff that’s not in the regular schoolbook.

“They have an ownership feeling about the environment and that it’s their future,” Hackman said.

In her class the venerable Weekly Reader, as well as study materials from city and county environmental programs, news clippings and discussions of “the conservation message that’s constantly on the TV news,” supplement the 7-year-old official textbook--which has few substantial environmental references.

Discussing plants and animals in danger of extinction, Hackman said, “pulls them in” to subjects that used to put them to sleep--botany and biology.

The children may see perils for their own species because of environmental degradation, but according to Hackman, this does not inspire fear.

“They have a sense of power. They don’t feel like victims,” she said. “Some of them can’t wait to do something.”

Inventing eco-solutions is one means of expression for her students. And several have already had experiences in this arena.

They participated in kid-inventor contests such as “Invent America,” an annual event supported by the U.S. Patent Office. One of Hackman’s student-inventors, Michael Marsh, 10, won a prize for his “Ecology Cat” kitty litter--made from crushed recycled cardboard and baking soda.

Meanwhile, county-wide schemes are afoot to promote environmental education. By putting $75,000 into a high school air pollution program, Ventura County Air Pollution Control officer Dick Baldwin wants to use part of a grant from 3-M of Camarillo given to our local Clean Air Fund.

Yesterday, the County Board of Supervisors moved to use this money--along with that of prospective co-sponsors--to hold environmental workshops for local teachers and, by next fall, provide free instructional materials for students.

Baldwin also pointed out that county schools like Hackman’s already have an 80% participation in the Ventura Regional Sanitation District’s “Think Earth” program of ecology consciousness raising. Such projects should serve to direct lots of local whiz kids to participate in Alan Tratner’s Young Eco-Inventors Contest.

* FYI

Ventura County teachers and students from kindergarten age through the 12th grade interested in competing for the cash prizes or the school computers awarded at the Young Eco-Inventors Contest should call (818) 906-2700 for entry forms.