The Friends of Camp Helen State Park are excited to announce the purchase and installation of 880 ft long and 5ft wide AccessRec mats half-way to the beach at Camp Helen State Park.

Because of the community’s support of kayak rentals and the pumpkin patch, the CSO was able to fully fund this project for the park without corporate donations or grants.

The mats have been installed along the trail to the beach as well as at the kayak rental area.

The mats provide an easier walk to the beach for everyone but will also accommodate wheelchairs and strollers.

The mats create less impact to the natural resources than boardwalks or other developed structures.

The Friends of Camp Helen hope to continue renting kayaks and selling pumpkins to complete the other half of the mat within a year.

Camp Helen State Park is located at 23937 Panama City Beach Parkway (Highway 98), Panama City Beach, just west of the Lake Powell Bridge.

By Bill Husfelt,
Superintendent, Bay District Schools

“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”
– Marian Wright Edelman

I have often said that a rising tide lifts all ships when it comes to our schools and what I mean by that is that our schools don’t make our students successful, actually our students make our schools successful.

And nowhere is that more evident than at our schools on the beach and particularly at J.R. Arnold High School.
J.R. Arnold High School has the distinction, and privilege, of being the beach’s only high school and in that capacity, the school draws from an incredibly diverse and supportive community. The beach is, essentially, an old-fashioned “one horse town” when it comes to the high school experience and that’s evident when we look at the community support for Arnold and its students and staff.

Since 2002, J.R. Arnold High School has almost always maintained an “A” or a “B” rating from the Florida Department of Education and that, in and of itself, is simply commendable.
It’s hard to quantify all of the calculations that go into developing a school grade but, suffice to say, students from all socio-economic backgrounds must be achieving and making significant academic gains for a school to earn an A or a B rating. When you consider the incredible challenges our community has faced in the past three years, and the fact that J.R. Arnold was the site of the county’s longest running emergency shelter after the hurricane, those accomplishments seem even more incredible. Our Arnold students and their families were absolutely amazing after the storm and everyone just pitched in to do whatever they could to make the double sessions at Surfside Middle School work while that was our only option. I know that we’re all praying we never, ever have to do that again!

If you’ve attended any sporting event at Arnold you can also easily see the level of community support the school has. Stands are always crowded with a plethora of students, parents and community members and there’s also significant attendance when teams compete or play out of town.

You simply can’t place a dollar value on that kind of support and commitment but it’s definitely something we don’t take for granted and it’s something we appreciate.

I certainly encourage all beach parents to begin investing at Arnold regardless of the grade level of your students. Students need to understand what comes next in their education and there’s no better way to make sure your future Marlin is set for success than by involving him/her as often as you can in our high school events. We’d love to see stands full of future Marlins at an upcoming football game and we’re sure your students would find our version of “Friday Night Lights” pretty exciting. And the energy from stands full of excited fans really contributes to the experience our student athletes have while competing.

Likewise, our high school students make sure they give back as they can and one of the most memorable ways they do that is with our Senior Walks. Days before graduation, our seniors dress up in all of their graduation regalia and visit their beach elementary and middle schools so students can see them and catch a glimpse of graduation and all of the accompanying pomp and circumstance. The senior walks are also a chance for our graduates to find some of the influential teachers from their earlier years and to thank them for their investment, support and encouragement.

All of our schools on the beach are simply amazing and they are accomplishing great things with our students thanks to hard-working and passionate educators and support employees and because of the incredible support from parents and guardians.

Thank you for everything you continue to do to support our beach-side students and I look forward to seeing you at an upcoming Arnold Marlin event.

Stay safe and God Bless!

By Brittany Kirke

The mission – to bring together community partners to identify solutions to meeting the needs of our most vulnerable communities and thereby creating resilient and strong neighborhoods. To do this, It takes partnerships from every corner of the community including churches, businesses, and government. And in the middle? A leader who understands how to collaborate with these partners to solve issues and find solutions to help the community grow. In Bay County, that person is Janice Lucas, Executive Director of LEAD Coalition. This year, LEAD (an acronym for Leadership, Empowerment, and Authentic Development) has tackled major initiatives.

Starting with COVID 19 at the beginning of the year, LEAD is the anchor organization for our local Resilient American Communities (RAC), a public-private consortium focused on COVID 19 prevention efforts and increasing social equity for our disenfranchised communities. LEAD and partners organized Vaccine Clinics and distributed COVID Monitoring Kits, vaccinating more than 2,500 citizens. Since summer, LEAD and partners have organized Testing Clinics. Pivotal to LEAD’s launch into COVID initiatives was the development of a COVID dashboard on the local RAC website that tracked COVID stats and provided important community information.

While tackling COVID 19, LEAD received a grant from the Emergency Solutions Grant Fund and in June launched the “Better Life Homeless Solutions Program” to address the needs of homeless individuals in Bay County. This work requires the staff to be ready at a moment’s notice to manage a call for help. The program provides hygiene products, food, emergency shelter, housing placement and assistance to find work.

This year, LEAD, in partnership with Macedonia Church and Cornerstone Trust, granted micro-loans of $5,000 to three local businesses in the Glenwood area.

The crown jewel achievement for LEAD this year was receiving a $10,000 pledge from Gayle Littleton to create the Ginger Littleton Youth Development Fund. Gayle wanted to honor her mother, an educator/advocate for our youth for more than forty years. This fund represents another opportunity to create equity and support our youth in our most vulnerable communities. Janice was challenged to raise matching funds, and in one night raised over $7,000.

LEAD will continue its mission and if you would like to support this outstanding organization, please visit leadabetterlife.org to donate.

By Erin Lang

Science has always been a focus of Surfside Middle School. From our outstanding pre-engineering program to wet week at the Gulf and Bay Day in St. Andrews Bay, Surfside makes every effort to bring science to life for our students.

There are a few new projects taking shape this year. We were lucky enough to receive a grant from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences for a full-sized aquaponics system for our students to operate as part of the Agriculture program. Aquaponics is growing in popularity throughout the world, and there are more and more career opportunities in the field every single year. This style of farming allows the farmer to grow fish and plants together in a much smaller space, utilizing far less water than traditional farming. Our system at Surfside includes a 250 gallon fish tank and space to grow over 100 plants.

We are planning on raising catfish as we grow a variety of plants including lettuce, basil, and tomatoes. However, these are not just your everyday tomatoes. As a way to connect this to the real world of science, we are going to grow tomatoes from seeds that spent 30 days aboard the International Space Station. As part of the Tomatosphere project, students will grow tomatoes from two sets of seeds. One set has been to space, and the other has not. The goal is to see if there is any difference between the tomatoes that have been to space and those that have not. One day, humans may need to be able to grow their own food in space, and this is a tiny step in collecting real data to figure out if this is possible. We won’t know which seeds are the “space tomatoes” and which are not until we submit the data to the project leaders.

This brings us back to the aquaponics system. If in the future, humans on a space station or another planet have to grow food, they will likely have limited space. Our research in the classroom will provide data to scientists exploring the possibilities of utilizing aquaponics systems for growing food in space.

For many students, this is the first time that they have ever thought about where their food comes from. As our world changes, the way that we grow and distribute our food is changing. We need to be able to grow more food using less and less space. Aquaponics is showing itself to be a viable solution to this.

Studies show that middle school is the time when students “decide” if they are going to take an interest in science and possibly pursue it as a career. This is why we are so passionate about science at Surfside. The main goal of the Agriculture program is for students to have both an appreciation for the food they eat and perhaps spark an interest that could turn into a career.