Youngsters make sure there’s fish in the future

PALMER — The Matanuska Lake parking lot overflowed when busloads of children released buckets of fish as part of the Salmon in the Classroom program.

More than 1,000 elementary school students took part in the end-of-year festivities, releasing almost 10,000 rainbow trout and silver salmon fingerling.

Tuesday capped Department of Fish and Game’s nine-month-long program of students raising salmon fry in their classroom. The program began in September when each class took 150 to 300 eggs from Spring Creek. Throughout the school year, students learned about the life cycle and biology of the fish, said Samantha Osland of Fish and Game.

The guiding hope of the programs is that students will become stewards of the fisheries resource, Osland said.

“When they take ownership, they care a lot more. They become responsible for the lakes and rivers,” she said. “Besides, it’s important they are not afraid of fish by the fourth-grade level.”

After being raised all year in the classroom, the fish were released into Matanuska Lake. Almost every elementary school in the Valley along with many homeschoolers attended the event, by far the biggest yet, Osland said.

For the students and classes that didn’t raise fish, a hatchery truck was on hand doling out rainbow trout fingerlings into buckets.

Two by two, the students marched the buckets down the path to the water’s edge. There they tipped the contents down a chute and shouted in excitement as their fish swam off into the lake.

In addition to releasing the fish, students took part in a number of activities related to fishing. They learned to cast both hookless flies and spinners into hula hoop targets. They identified juvenile fish swimming in a tank and pelts and bones of Alaskan animals. There was a table titled “You Don’t Know Scat” with piles of replicated feces from different creatures.

While this year was the largest turn out the Valley has seen, the event in Anchorage was even larger, said Jay Baumer, biologist for Fish and Game. The first release in Anchorage saw 2,500 students sign up with many more showing up the day of, he said. All the activities are the same, and there are similar events in Soldotna and Kenai as well.

The program is free of charge to the classrooms, funded by state and federal funds, Baumer said. A portion of every fishing license sold goes to a federal account called the Dingle-Johnson Fund. This money then gets passed back to Fish and Game for educational programs like Salmon in the Classroom. For every dollar the state puts in, the Dingle-Johnson Fund matches it 3 to 1.

“The whole idea is to get people outside,” Baumer said. “This is a great opportunity to get them informed about fishing and taking advantage of the resources available to them.”

Contact Todd L. Disher at todd.disher@frontiersman.com or (907) 352-2252.