We may never truly know why the chicken crossed the road, but we certainly know why chickens will be at Lakewood Elementary. Every winter, teachers and administrators join together to make a Wish List of items, not provided by the district, that they feel will make a meaningful impact on their students’ experience.
In the spring of every school year, leaders from Lakewood Elementary and their funding groups, Friends of Lakewood (FOL), Lakewood Early Childhood PTA (LECPTA) and the Lakewood Elementary PTA, come together to review the Wish List submissions and decide what from the List will receive funding for the next school year.
This round of Wish List meetings was the first time LECPTA President Jacki Pavlick and Lakewood Elementary PTA President Caitlin Maddox were involved. They had some idea of what to expect: special folders, new classroom furniture, art supplies, you know, the normal stuff.
The teachers don’t just make Wishes. They research. They plan. They pitch. Essentially, it’s kind of a written version of Shark Tank — except, instead of a cast of sharks like Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner, you have a cast of parents like Maddox and Pavlick.
So imagine the intrigue and curiosity that filled the room when the Wish for a chicken coop made its way onto their tables.
Three teachers were behind the chicken coop proposal: fourth grade science teacher Eryn Davila, first grade general education teacher Nicole Jones and third grade ELAR and social studies teacher Heather Shopoff.
“We had to think about all the things that would excite teachers to really go out there and get their kids to have this experience. So we just looked at all the possible hands-on learning opportunities in every discipline. Not everyone is a science teacher, you know, but we want to be able to teach math out there with the chickens and reading and writing and art. So it really does touch everyone,” Davila says. “I think we just all brought our own specialties together for the proposal.”
For Davila, this isn’t her first rodeo, or perhaps, coop. She previously taught at a Montessori school that also had chickens. She saw first hand the benefits of having students outdoors and interacting with animals as the head of that chicken program. She loved the idea of the kids “taking ownership of the chickens and learning so many valuable lessons out of the classroom and in the classroom” and realized that she missed being around chickens herself.
For Shopoff, it would always be a no-brainer to bring animals into the classroom, being a self-proclaimed “animal person” with a degree in agricultural business. She grew up raising lambs and has had several class pets, the most recent of which is a handful of toads.
“I just think it makes it a better environment for the kids,” she says.
The same builder for the coop, McKinney-based Urban Chicken, also agreed to build a gazebo. In came Jones, a North Texas Master Naturalist and Dallas County Master Gardener, who in her 11 years at the school has described the school’s garden as her “passion project.”
The coop is almost complete and the chickens will make their debut this October. Students have already begun asking the teachers when they can expect to see them, occasionally peeking outside of their classrooms at the work-in-progress sitting in the center of the campus.
“We’re looking at the recess initiative. We tentatively will call it ‘Flower-Power Friday.’ Kids will go outside, and then we’ll have a master gardener, master naturalist with a parent volunteer outside to work in the garden spaces. So one will be the chicken coop. But we’re hoping we’ll do that too in October,” Jones says.
The trio also plans to have a teacher representative in each grade that will monitor and allow access to the coop for students during recess and other designated times. This, alongside the integration of the chickens into the curriculum, will be the beginning of a new kind of outdoor learning experience for Lakewood students.
“I’m really grateful, especially to the teachers who are kind of adding this onto their plates. The staff at the school, the teachers, they all are incredible and do such a good job, and then for them to work outside of their everyday with their big classes and big to-do lists and to think of things that they could do more for the kids, it’s incredible,” Maddox says.
For Maddox and Pavlick, this is something they are sure will positively impact Lakewood students for generations to come.
“The passion that they have, the three teachers that brought it to us, all of the research they did about the benefits, you know, being outside, doing hands-on learning, learning how to care for a living thing,” Pavlick says. “Some of that is a really unique experience that you don’t get from a large city public school education. I just felt really strongly about it and I could picture kids in 20 years being like ‘I had chickens at my elementary school.’”
