First Lutheran Church
Paola, Kansas
 | ||||
| ||||
Barrett Young - Junior Ranger
Last modified: Friday, February 15, 2008 4:17 AM CST
Program makes for one well-traveled 12-year-old
By Erin Wisdom, ewisdom@miconews.com
Twelve-year-old Barrett Young of Paola has completed Junior Ranger programs all over the country, as shown by the red flags covering this United States map. He has visited more than 100 historic sites. (Photo by Erin Wisdom / ewisdom@miconews.com)
Barrett Young is home-schooled, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t go on field trips. If anything, it just means that his field trips tend to be a little bit longer than most students’.
Twelve-year-old Barrett, who is the son of Wayne and Dee Young of Paola, has visited more than 100 national parks and historic sites in his lifetime. And during these trips to locations across the country, he’s also accomplished the feat of completing 146 Junior Ranger programs.
These programs are offered by the National Park Service as a way for children to experience and interact with parks at their own pace. By filling out a booklet with math, history, reading and other activities related to a specific site, a student earns a patch, badge or certificate to signify his completion of that particular Junior Ranger program.
With 146 programs under his belt, Barrett has plenty of patches — enough to fill two sashes, in fact.
“He was a year and a half old when he got his first one,” Dee said as she pointed to the patch representing Alaska’s Denali National Park.
Since then, Barrett has visited volcanos in Hawaii and battlefields in Virginia. He’s been to the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona and the desert in southern Arizona. He’s seen “a lot of rocks” in North Dakota, and, of course, several of the historically significant places in Kansas: Nicodemus, Fort Scott and the Brown vs. Board of Education site in Topeka.
What was perhaps Barrett’s biggest trip, however, took place in November, when he and his parents went to Washington, D.C. There, he had a chance to meet Dirk Kempthorne, the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and Mary Bomar, the director of the National Park Service. Dee noted that Bomar and Barrett really hit it off over their shared interest in national parks and historic sites.
“She’d look at a patch (on one of Barrett’s sashes), and they’d both start talking about something they remembered from that place,” Dee said.
Barrett stayed in touch with Bomar, sending her a letter at Christmas time to update her on other Junior Ranger work he’d done. Just last week, he received a letter back from her saying, among other things, that she was going to pass his letter on to First Lady Laura Bush.
In the next few months, Barrett and his parents plan to visit sites in Georgia and the northwest part of the country, where he’s never been before. These trips are sure to offer plenty of new experiences, as well as opportunities to get to know others who share his interests.
“He’s gotten to meet a lot of people this way,” Dee said.
