SEDALIA’S OUTDOOR CLASSROOM – Sedalia Elementary teacher Keri Dowdy’s fourth grade environmental team for the third consecutive year will participate in the Disney Planet Challenge. Both previous teams won Kentucky’s competition. Last year’s team placed third nationally.

This year, Lowe’s Home Improvement Centers has provided the team a $5,000 grant.

This summer, two volunteers, Dylan Williams and Mike Duncan of WindowsPlus, built a structure that Dowdy calls an outdoor classroom.

“It’s a raised planter with benches,” she said. “Shupe’s Nursery donated peat moss and Carolyn Gargus from Shupe’s helped us with the work. Our environmental team worked hard to get it in shape!”

Currently, the planters are filled with soil and mulch and are ready for classes to plant.

Other features include bird feeders, hummingbird feeders, a thermometer, a rain gauge, and a storage box that has garden tools, seeds, potting soil, bird feed, and buckets. Bird houses and a weather station are coming.

Dowdy extended special thanks for recent hard work to Gargus, custodian Tim Clark, teachers Gail Howard and Kayla Abbott, environmental team members and their parents. She concluded, “It would not have been possible without them all!”