School Environmental Presentations/Nature Cleanups
Summary Of Activity
Dory Rossiter uses her position as a television anchor and reporter to inform the public about environmental issues. Throughout her career, she has done hundreds of stories on issues like recycling, water conservation, bird migration paths, soil erosion, land conservatorship, pollution, soil contamination and air quality. In addition to this, for the past 19 years, she has been taking her stories into elementary school classrooms, teaching students about recycling and caring for the environment in simple ways. She has also organized successful clean-ups in natural areas around southern Alberta, encouraging students and community members to participate.
Barriers/Challenges To Success
One of the biggest challenges Dory Rossiter has experienced has been in time management. She does all of her school and community group visits on her own time at her own expense, while maintaining a full-time job at CTV, a morning show on CKVN 98.1 Radio and a daily weather and environmental column for the Lethbridge Herald newspaper. After the first couple years of school visits, Dory found herself unable to meet all demands for environmental visits--even from as far away as British Columbia and Montanaa. Her solution was to create individual videos for schools and community groups that she was unable to visit due to time limitations. She has sent video tapes to many of these out of the way locations, so she can "be there" in video. In these situations, students and organization members can e-mail her with questions and comments, whereby she can then engage them.
