 Eastern Kentucky PRIDE recognized exceptional contributions to the environment of southern and eastern Kentucky at the Fifth Annual PRIDE Envi Awards on May 16, 2005.
About 700 people attended the event at The Center for Rural Development in Somerset. WYMT-TV will broadcast the awards program at 7:00 p.m. on June 20. KET will air the show at 9:00 p.m. ET on June 28.
The winners of Envi Awards were:
• Boston Elementary School (Whitley County) was named the Elementary School Campus of the Year for promoting environmental education through hands-on learning opportunities with an outdoor classroom, nature trail, wetland and school-wide recycling.
• North Laurel Middle School (Laurel County) earned the Middle School Campus of the Year Award for its expansive outdoor-classroom projects, aquaculture studies, mentoring program, school-wide recycling program and participation in local cleanups.
• Southwestern High School (Pulaski County) was recognized as the High School Campus of the Year for it’s outstanding environmental education facilities, community education projects, participation in local cleanups and unique Raptor Rehabilitation Program.
• Lake Cumberland Community Action Agency Head Start took home the College/Community Project of the Year Award for teaching head-start students in 10 counties about the environment in fun ways, such as planting flowers in local parks and meeting “Curby, the Recycling Robot.”
• Higgins Blair (Perry County) earned the Tony Turner Volunteer of the Year for the dedication he displays by volunteering about 30 hours a week, despite chemotherapy treatments, to transport and supervise community service workers assigned by the court to collect roadside litter.
• Whitehouse Homemakers Club (Johnson County) received the Rogers-Bickford Environmental Leadership Award for heading up local cleanup and environmental awareness efforts, including offering a scholarship to college-bound students who volunteer in their annual Spring Cleanup.
• Tom Biebighauser, wildlife biologist with the Daniel Boone National Forest, won the Kentucky PRIDE Award for his leadership in restoring the state’s wetlands and his commitment to educating children and adults about wetlands, which are important for habitat and flood control.
The Envi Awards ceremony featured Congressman Hal Rogers and Dave Shuffett, host of KET’s Kentucky Life program. Rogers co-founded PRIDE in 1997 with the late General James E. Bickford, then Secretary of the Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet.
“Thank you for doing your part to make our region a cleaner, healthier place to live, work and visit,” Rogers said to the award winners and the 10 finalists.
“With the Envi Awards, we pay tribute to the most exceptional of you, but there are thousands more out there doing their part to clean up our environment,” Rogers continued. “There is nothing short of an historic transformation taking place in southern and eastern Kentucky. Thousands of volunteers and community leaders are turning back decades of pollution. And a new generation is learning to avoid the mistakes of the past.”
PRIDE serves 38 counties in southern and eastern Kentucky. The organization links citizens with the resources of local, state and federal agencies to clean up the region’s waterways, end illegal trash dumps and promote environmental education and awareness. PRIDE is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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