Section 5

So how did I get into so much trouble from taking water samples and counting worms? Hold on Aunt Kayla, I have to tell it all or you won't understand. But I still maintain that this thing was all Lenny's fault. You see, in Mr. Jones class (He is our social studies teacher by the way) we were required to give a presentation on some government agencies. It just figures that Lenny got assigned the E.P.A. That stands for “Environmental Protection Agency.” Lenny was so worked up about Mrs. Kuhn's speech on the protection of worms, soil and water sources that he started asking Mr. Jones all kinds of questions about how to fix what had happened to the Sandy Run creek and the Lehigh River. Mr. Jones was really interested in our results and he made us do a project on the problems of abandoned mines in our area. Mr. Jones is very big on civic duty and citizen involvement. He’s always telling us about protests he attended in the 60’s. (I don’t know why teachers think we kids are interested in stuff like this but they do.)

You could tell that Mr. Jones was really psyched that Lenny was so excited and soon Lenny had the whole class talking about what we could do. Mr. Jones gave us lot of choices: write a letter to our congressman, circulate a petition to have the site cleaned up or write to the newspaper. Lenny asked if we could design a web page with our lab results and Mr. Jones said that would be okay as long as Mrs. Travis, the technology teacher, kept an eye on our project. We posted all our results from Mrs. Kuhn’s class complete with photographs of the earthworms. We made sure to point out who was responsible, namely the company that owns these old mines and discharges into Sandy Run. We used graphic software that we learned in Mrs. Travis’ class to make these really awesome Mad magazine style graphics. Samantha made an animated graphic of worms using the company logo. It looked really cool with the worms all writhing around from the toxic effects from the chemicals. The company’s name is Chem-co. So I made up the slogans, "Say No to Chem-Co! Farmers can't hoe, thanks to Chem-Co. Just Go Chem-Co!" This is where the trouble began. After we had posted our protest web site, we had a meeting in the principal’s office. I had never even been inside the principal's office!

Of course we were in a lot of trouble even though we were trying to do something good. I mean Mrs., Kuhn, Mr. Jones, and Mrs. Travis all seem excited our project. But Principal McAdams told us that we couldn't publish our web page without any proof. We told him we had the results from Mrs. Kuhn's experiments but he said that wasn’t good enough. (Even though we had gotten an A on the project!) He also was talking about lawyers and how the school could get into trouble because of our website and it was illegal to go messing around with a company’s logo. Aunt Kayla, we were only telling the truth! You should have seen how mad Lenny got. He said he’d mess up any logo he wanted if the company was going to mess up everyone’s environment. And then Mrs. Kuhn took Mr. McAdams' side against us! At first, Lenny almost cried and then I really thought Lenny was going to burst into tears or have a swearing fit or something right there in the principal’s office. We all felt pretty bad. And Daryl Jenkins was out in the hallway smirking at us the whole time. (I think I told you that he’s a regular at the principal’s office, didn’t I?)