Singer gets kids, nature in tune

SPRINGDALE - Marshall Mitchell has been performing music in front of live audiences, with nothing to hide behind but a guitar, for “half of forever,” as he puts it. But he never felt intimidated until he stepped in front of his first audience made up entirely of children.

“The scaredest I’ve ever been was in front of a second-grade class,” Mitchell said. “Because if you say something, and then you deviate, they don’t let you slide. They do not let you slide.”

In 2010, Mitchell, who had been performing “ Cowboy Music for Kids” in schools and other venues throughout the region with the Mid-America Arts Alliance for several years, was approached by Jennifer Michaels, a founding member of the Illinois River Watershed Partnership. The partnership, a nonprofit environmental educational outreach program, was looking for a way to reach schoolchildren with a message of environmental stewardship.

“We were looking for a unique way to do our education and outreach,” Michaels said. When she began researching programs for children, she discovered the NewJersey Department of Education’s “Clean Water Raingers” program, a series of coloring and activity books that emphasized many issues similar to those of the Illinois River Watershed, Michaels said.

Michaels said the New Jersey Education Department was happy to let the partnership use and adapt the materials to the needs of Northwest Arkansas.

“It was a good first start because we didn’t have the initial expense of creating supplies, but it wasn’t enough,” Michaels said. “So I decided we needed music. Music gets the kids’ attention.”

However, Michaels said, she was unimpressed with the environmentally themed music for children that she found in her research.

“The music that we found, it was … not great,” Michaels said. “So we contacted Mr. Mitchell.”

“I asked him if he could write a song about riparian buffers,” said Michaels, turning to Mitchell. “I think your comment was, ‘Sure. What is it?’”

“I had to educate myself,” Mitchell said.

Michaels said the partnership gave Mitchell a stack of educational materials about12 inches thick and asked him to write six songs about it. After combing the material, he found that writing about riparian buffers was actually second nature to him.

“What is a riparian buffer zone? Trees and the bushes and the vines and the roots that grow on the edge of the stream,” Mitchell said. “And it just kind of rolled from there.”

Mitchell’s first Clean Water Raingers concerts began in 2010 in the Springdale School District. Michaels developed a slideshow that played with Mitchell’s performances, adding visual elements to the performances. In 2012, Michaels asked Mitchell to write another four songs, and all 10 were recorded for a compact disc that the partnership now hands out at each performance.

Michaels and Mitchell said they take the program to about 20 schools each year. Delia Haak, executive director of the Illinois River Watershed Partnership, said the Clean Water Raingers project costs about $120,000 each year in materials and Mitchell’s financial compensation.

“A lot of that is from developing the CDs,” Haak said. “The CDs and the books we give away cost us about $4 for each set, and we give away about 10,000 of those a year.”

Haak said the project was funded in part with grants from the Wal-Mart Storm Water Division, as well as theBeaver Water District.

Mitchell performed Tuesday at Walker Middle School in Springdale. As of that performance, the Clean Water Raingers program had reached more than 24,900 schoolchildren, according to partnership records. Mitchell expected to surpass 25,000 with his Earth Day Festival performance in Little Rock this weekend.

In addition to expanding the fan base among area schoolchildren, Mitchell and the Illinois River Watershed Partnership have recently received recognition at the state level. Earlier this month, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality announced that the partnership was one of six finalists for the 2014 Envy Award for environmental stewardship. The department singled out the contributions of the Clean Water Raingers project. The winner of this year’s award will be announced Friday.

Michaels said acquiring grant funding for the project has sometimes been an uphill battle because it’s impossible to quantify its results in the short-term.

“This program is very hard to quantify because we’re not measuring anything,” Michaels said. “We won’t know until they’re teenagers or older whether it has sunk in and they’re actually taking care of their watershed.”

Mitchell said he measures the program’s effectiveness in terms of unsolicited feedback from children who have seen the program at one time or another, such as when he was performing “Cowboy Music for Kids” at Terracotta Studios about a year ago, and a young girl requested “The Watershed Song,” part of the Clean Water Raingers program.

“I’m an emotional slob anyway,” Mitchell said. “Things like that just brings tears to my eyes and make me want to bust out in smiles because it’s working.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 04/20/2014

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