City's Environmental Services Department receives Texas Environmental Excellence Award

The City of Laredo Environmental Services Department (ESD) will receive the Texas Environmental Excellence Award from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) at ceremonies in Austin on May 3.

The award recognizes the City ESD for its interactive environmental outreach program to 13,000 Laredo children in 60 schools across the city, a program that teaches students how to care for the environment and protect their only source of drinking water, the Río Grande. In tandem with the planet-saving mascot of the ESD, Toby Globy, several ESD staff members and technicians have pulled double duty as actors in the skits, bilingual songs, dramatic presentations, and creative educational exercises. The entourage deputizes students, charging them as “Eco-Deputies” with environmental responsibility and doing their best for litter control, recycling, water protection, and conservation.

According to John Porter, the ESD's environmental manager, the most significant feature of the innovative program is that it taps into a child's most critical learning skill: imagination.

“It is not your typical outreach for school kids. It has a certain magic at play,” Porter said. The ESD employees who wrote the skits, songs, and educational exercises and who engage the students are engineering associate Ivan Santoyo and environmental technicians Lucky Roncinske, Francisco Rosales, and Joe Rogerio. Their presentations at school take at least a half-day of preparation and delivery. Porter said that an EPA grant is going to allow the program to come to 40 child care centers. The ESD is currently working with its counterpart agency in Nuevo Laredo to establish a similar program.

Porter said the original program has evolved into a 26-minute sing-along video starring Laredo 's youngest environmentalists. A Spanish language version is also in the works.

Porter said the idea for educational outreach to young children came from the Citizens Environmental Advisory Committee and that the implementation of the program has had the endorsement and support of city administration and the City Council.

“LISD was very receptive to this green educational component that we offered for kinder through second grade,” Porter said. “UISD was more reticent, but once the schools started requesting it, we took the program to 25 of their elementary school campuses.”

According to Porter, Beto Almaraz from Corpus Christi invented Toby Globy and motivated ESD staff members to develop the program.

“There's a focus to the program that we want to keep,” Porter said. “We will probably change the presentation to keep it fresh, but we want to make sure that the one they see in 2nd grade won't be the one they saw in kinder.”

Mayor Elizabeth G. Flores and City Manager Larry Dovalina will receive the Texas Environmental Excellence Award, along with Santoyo, Roncinske, Rosales, and Rogerio.

This is not the first time Laredoans have been recognized with an Environmental Excellence Award. In 1995 Dr. Jim Earhart, Pamela Vaughn, Dr. Tom Vaughan, and María Eugenia Guerra received the award for the Río Grande International Study Center.