Think of oil and gas drilling like removing the filling from a Twinkie, Ohio science teachers were told in an industry-funded workshop last week. Each teacher was handed a snack cake and a plastic straw.
Put the straw in the wrong place, and you don’t get much cream. Put it in too many places, and you destroy the Twinkie. The teachers began poking around.
“It’s $100,000 every time you stick it in,” said a workshop leader.
This is one of the hands-on, fun activities the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program shares with teachers who want to show their students the science of fossil-fuel extraction.
The students also could build makeshift derricks, or use plastic foam and cotton to construct gas-pipe cleaners, or remove vegetable oil from jars full of gravel. The teachers tried these tasks in a conference room at the Easton Town Center Hilton.
Some laughed and cheered when they succeeded.
“I was impressed (at the workshop),” said Scott Spohler, a physics and physical-science teacher at Madison-Plains High School. “The kids are interested in hands-on activities. That’s a way to keep their attention.”
A controversy flared in January when environmentalists learned that Radio Disney had joined with the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program to tour elementary schools and science centers, teaching about the energy industry. They worried that the show sold children a positive image of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — the process of pumping millions of gallons of water and chemicals underground to break rock to free oil and gas.
Radio Disney eventually backed out, but not until the tour had made more than two dozen stops.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, though, has run science-teacher workshops, such as the one at Easton, for 16 years. It has created a curriculum that those teachers can use in their classrooms and experiments that they can show their students. It provides materials free of charge.
Most of it doesn’t address fracking directly but focuses more generally on extracting and refining raw oil and gas.
The education program conducts everything from last week’s one-hour workshops at the Science Education Council of Ohio’s annual Science Institute to overnight trips that include a visit to an oil field. Teachers can receive continuing-education credits and even some graduate-degree credit for attending.
The program, funded by the state’s oil and gas producers and those who receive royalties from production, isn’t exactly quiet about what it does. Its website presents sample experiments and lists the school districts that have participated. They include every district in Franklin County except Groveport Madison.
But many environmental groups didn’t know the extent of the activities until January’s controversy. Some still aren’t totally aware.
“It is troubling,” said Christian Adams, state associate with Environment Ohio, when told of the teacher workshops. He worried that “they are presenting an argument exploring the technology and downplaying the risks involved.”
It’s certainly true that the teacher workshops focus on the STEM curriculum — science, technology, engineering and math — said Rhonda Reda, the program’s executive director. The energy industry has thousands of jobs in Ohio that need to be filled by people who have some aptitude in those areas.
“We do not see kids pursuing careers in science,” she said. “That was the real reason (behind the program). The average age in our industry is 55. ... These are great-paying jobs with benefits."
Reda has given 300 presentations to civic and community groups in the past two years and often hears from people openly hostile to her and her industry. Not teachers, she said, who are most concerned with learning. It’s one of the reasons she enjoys the workshops.
“I’d rather come where people understand science,” she said.
Jane Hunt, an environmental-science and biology teacher at Upper Arlington High, has worked closely with the energy education program. She’s a consultant with Education Projects & Partnerships, a central Ohio group that helped develop the program’s curriculum.
She helped lead the workshop at Easton. She said that like most teachers, she has her own concerns about the future of energy production.
“Because we are all users of energy, we have to understand where it comes from and why these decisions are being made about it,” she said. “There are some folks who have made up their minds, so they aren’t interested in the science.”
The Science Education Council of Ohio, the organizer of last week’s conference, invites the energy education program to present for the same reasons that it invites, for example, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to talk about sustainability and Metro Parks to talk about ecosystems, said Mike Hickey, the council’s executive director.
“It’s important for teachers to be up to speed on what’s going on scientifically in the world and relate that to students,” Hickey said.
And teachers use their best judgment when bringing the information from the program to students, said Spohler, the Madison-Plains teacher who was impressed with the workshop. He also said this afterward: “I don’t think we know enough about fracking to do it.”
Spohler assigned his students to write a paper about fracking this school year, before he knew about the energy education program. He gave the kids information that argued in favor of the process and against the process, as well as information that seemed down the middle. He asked them to form their own opinions.
“You present all sides of an argument to be fair,” he said.
And now that he has attended the session at the Hilton, he’ll present some of its information to his students, too. He might be unsure about fracking, but he wants to learn more from the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program.
“I’m really interested in that summer workshop,” Spohler said.