Patriot Elementary students winners of cartoon contest
Three fourth graders at Patriot Elementary School were selected as winners of the annual J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge Conservation Cartoon Contest.
The winners include first place Ochun Lopez Valdez, second place winner Karolina Machado and third place winner Brody Howdyshell. These three students were chosen from more than 160 entries.
Supervisory Refuge Ranger Toni Westland said Lopez Valdez’s “message ‘we can work together’ seems just so appropriate right now, and I talked to the students how people are working together to bring the refuge back, so it was a great teaching moment.”
The winners were chosen from staff at Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, which is now part of the greater “Ding” complex. The students were awarded mouse pads with their art printed on them, along with art supplies. The artwork will be hung at the Visitor Education Center once the center reopens.
“We go to the schools when school starts and explain about ‘Ding’ Darling the man and current conservation issues that affect our world,” said Westland, who has been overseeing the contest for more than 20 years. “We usually award the winners at our annual October event, which was called off this year because of the hurricane. So, instead we went to Patriot Elementary and made a celebration of it with cookies for everyone and the kids doing drum rolls when we announced the winners. It was very exciting. The winners were all so well-spoken explaining their cartoons. Kudos to art teacher Angela Johnson for getting her students excited about the contest and conservation.”
The theme every year is conservation, based on current events. This year, the visitor services team created a video that they showed the students when they introduced the contest at the beginning of the school year.
The contest, which began more than 30 years ago, honors the legacy of “Ding” Darling as a Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist of the last century. Local editorial cartoonist Doug MacGregor helped teach cartooning at the participating schools in the early years of the contest. Before COVID, fourth graders in six local elementary schools participated and were judged as a whole.
This year, Patriot Elementary School and The Sanibel School participated, and first, second and third place winners were chosen at Patriot Elementary School.
The winning students at The Sanibel School have not yet been chosen, as all of the entries have been locked in the school since Hurricane Ian impacted the island. Westland said The Sanibel School won’t be able to access the entries, if they survived the storm, until early to mid-January.
She said the refuge is looking at ways to evolve the contest in the coming years.