Ellsworth Jr./Sr. High School fielded a team of five students to compete at the state Envirothon competition April 23 at Camp Woods YMCA, Elmdale.

Students competed in eight categories against 10 other teams from across the state. Teams included St. John’s Catholic, Manhattan, Olathe North, Holton, Jefferson County, North, Uniontown, Wakefield, Rock Creek, Mission Valley and Kinsley. The Ellsworth team placed ninth overall.

The Ellsworth team, consisting of Josie Kueser, Karli Haase, Cyrus Grothusen, Lance Muchow and Valen Vague, was coached by ad education teacher and FFA adviser Kara Quilter and CTE coordinator and FFA adviser Karl Dawn Stover.

Envirothon is North America’s largest high school environmental education competition. The competition tests students’ knowledge and skills in five content areas: Soils and Land Use, Forestry, Wildlife, Aquatic Ecology and Rangeland Management.

For all the students, going to state was a first, and they found it a little more difficult than district on April 9.

“I had rangeland. It was my first time to go to state. It was fun and there were a lot of people,” Haase said. “Districts were much easier. Well, the tests were about the same, but the competition wasn’t as difficult as it was at state.”

Each student on the team took a specialty area, with Haase taking rangeland, Kueser taking soil use, Grothusen had aquatics, Muchow took wildlife and Vague had forestry.

Grothusen enjoyed his aquatic assignment.

“I like fish. They tested our ability to identify different types of fish,” he said. “But there were a lot of different things. We had to answer questions about fish habitat and where they would go and live. It was a lot of water management.”

Vague also found state more difficult.

“I did the forestry. State was definitely harder. You had to pay a lot more attention to the presenters compared to district,” he said. “There were lots of kids from other schools.”

The outdoor area at Camp Woods gave the teams many different scenarios to work with.

“It made it a lot of fun. You could be with your group and talk and work together,” Haase said. “We got more aware of what is going on with our current issues and did a lot of team bonding. We made some connections.”

State competition added an additional hurdle for the team that is not a part of district — an oral presentation.

“There is a part of the state competition that is not at district that requires the team to take a scenario and base an oral presentation off it and create a slide presentation,” Quilter said. “I had them make a script. You don’t have to make a script, but it is easier when you know what you have to say. This year’s oral presentation topic was wildfires and how we can use prescribed burns to prevent them. They were tasked with being an advisory committee to a group in the Flint Hills.”

Dana Schmelzle, past Kansas Envirothon Chairperson, shared, “One of the great aspects of Envirothon is the problem solving. This is especially evident during the oral presentations given at the state competition. Each team is given a real-life scenario based on the current environmental issue theme. The amount of research, cooperation, planning and practice is always evident on the competition day.”

The oral presentation was a new challenge for the team.

“There are a lot of teams when they go to regionals they have a pretty good idea that they are going to go to state, so they probably had a month or two to work on this oral presentation,” Quilter said. “The team decided with like 10 days that they were going to go to state, so they created this oral presentation in about four days, and for the time they had and the knowledge they had, they rocked it.”

For more information on the FFA team and Envirothon, visit the Ellsworth FFA Facebook page.