Rev. Brown students participate in migration program

SPARTA — The second-grade students from Reverend George A. Brown Memorial School are among over 60,000 students in the United States and Canada participating in the 19th Annual Symbolic Monarch Butterfly Migration program taking place across North America.

This program is sponsored and presented by Annenberg Learner, a division of the Annenberg Foundation. In the fall, students from the U.S. and Canada create paper symbolic butterflies and send them to schoolchildren in Mexico for the winter, mimicking the annual migration of Monarch Butterflies to their winter home in the Sierra Madre Mountains of central Mexico. These symbolic butterflies carry messages of goodwill, friendship and monarch conservation.

Over the fall and winter months, the Reverend Brown students learn about the monarch lifecycle and habits as well as the environmental threats to these insects. They also begin to build bridges of international cooperation in environmental issues by learning about the daily lives and culture of the Mexican students who are living close to the monarch sanctuaries, and often helping in the monarch conservation and protection effort.

In the spring, when the real monarchs are on their return journey from Mexico to the U.S. and Canada, the Mexican schoolchildren send the paper butterflies that have been wintering with them back to their northern neighbors with letters that tell about the daily lives of children in their country.

The Reverend Brown students, who have been participating in this exchange for three years, look forward each spring to receiving the packet from Mexico, with messages from their new Mexican friends and filled with paper butterflies.