St. Louis teacher leads student excursions

ST. LOUIS -- It was dusk, the field trip to a pond almost over. Parkway North High School biology teacher Russ Barton and his students began walking to their cars. Barton suddenly stopped, pointed his flashlight into the brush and dove in. The students heard a thump. And out walked Barton, holding a stunned opossum.

He pointed out the opossum's morphology to the students, taking note of the thick skull and the hairless tail. Then, he let it go.

"In my mind," recalls former student Jenny Bower, "this elevated Mr. Barton to Indiana Jones status."

Whether he's banding sparrows caught on the high school campus, running "poop tests" on soil samples or teaching students to skin and dissect cats, Barton is leading his students on Indy-like adventures.

One of the adventures took them to Arizona earlier in August, where the school took second place in the national Canon Envirothon, a contest for students studying environmental issues.

Barton, 34, and his wife, Sarah, a chemistry teacher at Ladue Horton Watkins High School, were the team's moderators. More than 265 teams from across the country and Canada competed in the contest, which included intense exams and an oral presentation. The Parkway North team was made up of Bower, Amal Al Lozi, Kathleen Beilsmith, Rebecca Frankenberger and Jon Lee.

Barton's team has won the state competition three years in a row.

"He'll try to tell you that he didn't do that much for our team, or that we did most of the hard work ourselves," Beilsmith said.

But in reality, Barton met with the students after school, brought in environmental experts to lead discussions, took them fishing, or just walked them around the school grounds, pointing out the flora and fauna of Maryland Heights.

"He's kind of like the Pied Piper," said fellow teacher Bill Bowman, explaining that other students besides the Envirothon team like to hang out during Barton's outdoor jaunts just because it's fun. "He can find just the most amazing things with a handful of dirt and some seeds and stuff. He can spin a real tale by just looking at what's there."

Nancy Snider, an education consultant with the Missouri Department of Conservation, which works closely with the Envirothon teams, said: "He's real. And the kids know when somebody's fake."

Barton doesn't consider himself a traditional tree-hugger, but he does call himself a conservationist. He grew up on a farm outside Marthasville, Mo., where he spent a lot of time hunting and exploring, getting an idea of how the natural world works and how all the little things work together.

Tom Cradick, who retired last year as Parkway North's science department chairman, once went on a fishing trip to Canada with Barton and was amazed when Barton pointed out fish or a species of duck Cradick had never seen before.

"What really sets him apart is an intense passion for what he does and a phenomenal expertise," he said.

The facts Barton shares with students aren't useless strands of knowledge, he said -- they're part of a tapestry.

"When someone points out one part of a tapestry, you can talk about the rest of it," he said. "In a context, things aren't trivial. In a context, things have their own little place."

Much of what he discusses with students focuses on environmental problems, and Barton said talking about the environment is one of the most important things he can do as a teacher.

"I don't have a pessimistic attitude," he said. "I have a lot of faith in the kids I teach."