Have you met … Kevin Willis?

Kevin Willis pictured with two of his students in Carmichaels High School’s greenhouse.
“I was a farm kid. Growing up I was always outside. Bringing in the cows and finding baby foxes …”
It’s 7:30 a.m. and I’m sitting across from teaching dynamo Kevin Willis as he checks off students coming to his classroom at Carmichaels Area High School. He’s beaming as he tells me in trailing sentences a little about himself and his passion for the natural world that lead him to be the kind of teacher who turns students into scientists, engineers, doctors, savvy citizens with an understanding of the footprint we leave on this earth.
It was a busy month of May with hardly any time for an interview – he and a team of five students were working overtime getting ready for the 2018 Pennsylvania Envirothon. His team won the county competition that was held at Hunting Hills on May 2 and will leave tomorrow (May 22) for the state competition at Susquehanna University. There, they will give their formal business presentation, then be tested to gauge their knowledge about soil, aquatics, plants and wildlife. This morning, he’s found a spare half hour to talk while his team preps for a dry run of their upcoming oral business presentation. Would l like to sit in and critique them? Of course!
“We’ve been third in state for the last three years,” Willis says. Last year’s team missed first place by 15.3 points. “This year, we’re going to win!”
There’s no separating Willis’ story from the story he’s helping his students write for themselves with every hands-on experience in and out of the classroom, with every environmental competition they take on. When he was their age, he was doing it too.
Willis was a freshman at Carmichaels Area High School when his dad Tom, the science vo-ag teacher at Jefferson-Morgan High School, held the first Envirothon in Greene County in 1988.
“They went to Reeds Gap State Park and I went with him. I was 14 and when I came back I wanted to do it here.” Willis and his friend, Joe Simon, helped organize a team, and with teacher Debbie Batis to lead them, “our team came in second at the county level in 1989. We were pumped! In 1990 and ’91, we got to go to Bald Eagle State Park and came in fourth at State in 1991.”
As a senior, Willis and fellow students went to Powdermill Nature Reserve in Westmoreland County and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Now he was learning from environmental experts. Later, at Outdoor Week at Penn State Nature Center on Shaver’s Creek, “I realized I learned more there than in the classroom.”
Kevin graduated in 1991 and headed off to Penn State University to pursue his love affair with nature, science and hands-on learning. He would bring it all back home in 1996 when he landed his dream job as a secondary school teacher certified in chemistry, biology and general and environmental science. He came ready to pay back all the teachers who inspired him – and to prove to a college professor he had made the right choice in careers.
After being urged to “branch out, don’t go home, I said no!” Willis recalls with another happy grin.
He came back to Greene County to teach and built his home on part of the 205-acre Willis Farm on Willis Road, Jefferson Township, now a century farm, started by his grandfather, George. He began coaching Envirothon teams and opening the classroom doors to the great outdoors. A busy 22 years later, he tells visitors to the welcome page of the high school website: “I spend most of my free time taking hikes in the woods with my daughter and playing trucks with my son!” Sundays find him being a worship leader at the First Christian Church of New Salem, Fayette County. Everything in between is chock full of 21st century science and the network of professionals, professors and fellow teachers that Kevin works with to make this kind of learning possible. “I couldn’t do this without them. We’re a team.”
Regional projects get students out of the classroom and into hands-on interaction with the real world – sampling soil and water to identify species, checking for pollutants and gauging the health of the Youghaganey River with University of California professors, partnering with Trout Unlimited to raise native brook trout from egg to fingerling in the classroom, then release them at Ohiopyle State Park.
“When my students go to California State University for a project, they get to work with six professors. Their passion is contagious.”
Following Willis’ lead, the school district built a grant-funded greenhouse in 2013 for students to propagate native plants from seeds DCNR Bureau of Forestry provides to restore habitat affected by invasive species. Their butterfly gardens feature clusters of milkweed plants to host the Monarch butterfly and provide nectar for this valuable species whose numbers have been in sharp decline in the last decade.
Adopting a stream with The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission got students into the wilds of Ryerson State Park to install devices to improve water flow and help protect stream banks.
The school has a walking trail stocked with native trees, shrubs and grasses. It is an outdoor classroom and a place for the community to wander as well, learning from what the students are doing to restore the natural balance.
When professionals come to the classroom, they sometimes bring friends – a rescued raptor or owl, or maybe a paddlefish recovered from a nearby lock. When it came time to unlock the secrets of soil that affect land usage, Willis brought in retired scientist Jake Eckenrode, who created the monoliths for the Smithsonian’s “Dig It!” exhibit.
By graduation, some students will have a four-credit course in college chemistry through Carlow University under their belts and an eye for a future in science. Kevin is an adjunct professor who trolls the ninth grade waters for budding scientists with his integrated science class. His students spend their high school years working together in the school’s environmental sciences elective course that gives them the edge when they participate in the yearly Envirothon competitions.
For these lucky students, the competition “has become a vehicle to prepare them for an environmental-related career,” president Dale Kotowski pointed out when the Chestnut Ridge Chapter of Trout Unlimited presented Kevin with their Coldwater Conservationist of the Year award this spring.
But the best award of all came May 22. I wake to the ding of my phone at 6:15 a.m. the next morning and read a message from a very happy Mr. Willis.
The Carmichaels Envirothon team won the state competition and will represent Pennsylvania at the North American Envirothon in Idaho.
Way to go!
Kevin jokes that he could have worked in a lab, searching for a cure for cancer, or be doing what he is doing now – preparing hundreds of students who someday may be the ones to find that cure.
Or, closer to home, teaching the skills to protect the environment by every day actions. “Everyone’s going to live somewhere, own a car, change their oil, plant something. What is the best way to do it? Every kid needs to know these things.”
That’s what great teachers do.