When I think back to my high-school science classes, I remember droning instructions about beakers, titrations, and precipitants – the terms blurring and the pace boring. Little that I remember has any practical application in my life now. I spiced up those classes when the teacher’s back was turned – fiddling with the gas spigot, pouring random chemicals onto metal objects to make smoke, or just mixing them in my own experiments.

None of this would have been necessary if I’d had Scott Jordan as my science teacher. His Fisheries and Wildlife Technologies class at Cuba-Rushford High School in upstate New York uses woods, ponds, and nature facilities as its lab.

I am sitting in the back of his classroom watching him teach his students the Latin name of the whitetail deer, why black locust was used for the deer facility fence posts, and which government agencies oversee which kinds of projects. At one point he sees a phone and calls out “Float Test!” – a reference to a time when he unceremoniously swiped a phone and plopped it into the classroom aquarium. Now, the threat is enough. “I hate those things,” he tells me later. “They are giving our kids the attention span of a goldfish – three to eight seconds.” But attention span does not seem to be a problem now. When the class ends, I check my watch to see if it was really a full period.

Students work with the Seneca Nation on the Hellbender Project, restoring the natural habitat of the hellbender, a native salamander. All photographs courtesy of Scott Jordan.

As a fourteen-year-old, Scott Jordan caught a sailfish that changed his world, at a camp in Florida. He had handled the fish expertly, and the sudden positive attention from the adults at the camp made him feel like a star. They wanted him to return as a counselor. He had tasted the inspiration of opportunity and success outside of his comfort zone, and he knew he now had to bring the same to many more.

After university Jordan moved to Alaska, gaining extensive field experience studying and working to conserve fish and wildlife. He was a “bald eagle hacker” – taking eggs and young eagle chicks for the project to repopulate New York state. But he had teaching in his blood from his parents and grandparents before him. That and a desire to give teens the same outdoor opportunities he had enjoyed brought him back to his own public high school in Cuba, New York.

He started by expanding the animal section of his traditional eighth-grade science class. But soon the fire had been passed on and the students were asking what more they could do. “If you give me every weekend, holidays, and summer, we’ll do something big,” Jordan told them. They had just moved into a new school with extra surrounding land. Now a pond for paddlefish and trout had to be dug and an indoor hatchery made. Grants and fundraising – a popular method was Cow Patty Bingo (look that one up for laughs) – enabled local contractors to do the heavy lifting, and teachers, parents, and students all worked together. There was something for students at every skill level. It became clear that if teens are given responsibility and choice in what they learn, they become incredibly committed. Before long the school had a wildlife center with classroom and display areas, a turkey roost, and eventually Deerassic Park, a twenty-four-acre high-fence deer enclosure with a raised observatory.

That’s where my wife, Kathleen, and I sit with Scott Jordan now, watching some big bucks gather courage to come closer in the dusk. “You know,” he whispers, “the class is verifying a calendar of rut activity that pinpoints three days that almost guarantee a deer for hunters.” Unfortunately, my wife hears this. Sure enough, I get a nudge in the side, and she pipes up, “See! You actually only need to go out on those three days!” I scowl.

Students learn how to measure and score whitetails.

Now well past the construction phase, the daily running of the facility is just as rewarding. The lives of the animals are dependent on the students’ commitment, which doesn’t end with the school day. Every student takes on something. The younger ones help the older ones. Even the upkeep of the building is shouldered by the students. Jordan has a lesson for other teachers – “If you are going to be a good teacher, you can’t be afraid that they might know more than you about certain things. Just present them with the problem, help them form teams, and let them go with it.” Some kids are uncomfortable with this at first, but he reminds them that their future jobs will demand this kind of problem-solving. “It is in the times when you are uncomfortable that growth happens,” he tells them.

Throughout the semester, the students check the age, weight, and length of the fish in a pond with student-made measuring devices. They bring in game-camera SD cards weekly so deer patterns can be analyzed. Sometimes, they help with age checks on the deer herd after the Department of Conservation anesthetizes them.

Jordan’s class is a science elective. The students have to show responsibility in all areas of their school life to take part. “We hold them to another standard, so if you are being a bonehead in the rest of the school, you are not representing what we are trying to put out here.” He will remind them if needed. Once they catch on, they toe the line. The opportunity to work outdoors can launch them into a wide range of careers, many that don’t even include conservation or wildlife. “I am thinking about becoming a heavy equipment operator,” sixteen-year-old Lincoln tells me. He is a current student and loves the outdoors but does not see a career in conservation. He feels that the lessons of hard work, honesty, and reliability that he has learned in the class translate directly to the “real world” he will enter. There are numerous government permits the program needs to apply for and maintain, and students who have an interest in law or administration help with this research and upkeep. For those who want them, there are college credits to earn.

Jordan’s students learn videography and production skills by running their own national TV show – CRCS Outdoors on Pursuit Channel. Unlike many other hunting shows, the show emphasizes the teens’ involvement and their respect for the animals they are caring for.

Age, weight, and length checks are performed on fish using student-made measuring devices. They act quickly so the fish can be released unharmed.

It’s the hard work and problem-solving they have learned to do that will make them successful, Jordan tells them. “Twenty percent of the jobs our eighth graders are going to get have not even been created yet, so I want every kid that comes out of here to be multifaceted. You don’t just do one thing, you’ve got to do several things well, so that you can be a chameleon and move and change, because that’s the way the world is going.” And no matter their career, they will all understand the importance of conservation and hunting and will speak up to rectify public misunderstandings.

Rural teenagers are often disadvantaged when competing with peers from better-funded suburban school districts, and opportunities for careers are limited. “The toughest thing for me is seeing kids going across the stage at graduation and they still don’t know what they are going to do,” Jordan says. “We need to at least steer them in the right direction.” Jordan believes that providing opportunities is the most important thing, as one experience could change the course for a kid. His class attempts to do this every day, but he also offers trips that could easily be bucket-list items – hunting and fishing expeditions to Alaska, New Zealand, and Florida, for example. Raising the funds for these trips is part of the education. “For some kids, this just starts a fire, and they go way beyond any expectations,” he tells me.

I think of the inner-city schools I know – the ones that struggle to have a playground, never mind other outdoor facility. These students need some of the same opportunities. I ask Jordan how his vision could work there. “Do one thing,” comes his quick advice. There are several established programs such as Trout in the Classroom and Envirothon, he tells me, that schools can take advantage of. Often, it just takes one inspired teacher to start one thing.

Jordan’s care extends beyond his school to kids who have more serious challenges. One night he saw a story on TV about Memphis Lafferty, who had lost his arms and legs at six months of age due to bacterial meningitis. Now he was expertly shooting a crossbow at a target! “This kid needs to hunt,” Jordan said, and started making calls. Within days Lafferty shot his first gun with a modified trigger mechanism, and shortly after that he bagged an audad and a deer in Texas. A hunting trip to a ranch in New York followed, and Lafferty capped that off with another dream – his first motivational speech to a school-wide assembly.

Scott Jordan helps Memphis Lafferty to use a gun in preparation for a hunt.

After visiting Jordan’s school, I spoke on the phone with fathers of other young men he has inspired in similar ways. Dustyn Green lives with cerebral palsy that keeps him in a wheelchair. He attended a nearby high school, but Jordan reached out to him and his father, setting up successful hunts. His father explained Jordan’s lesson: “Don’t give up. Maybe you can’t do something physically now but one way or another we’ll get you to where you want to go.” Green, now twenty-four, kept applying this lesson and recently landed a dream job at ESPN.

David Stromecki is forever grateful for opportunities provided for his son Ben, who died after a long battle with brain cancer in 2018, a day short of his thirteenth birthday. After Ben’s diagnosis, they kept up their father and son outdoor experiences, sometimes using the secret code “an appointment with Dr. Sylvania” when they needed to escape school for nearby Pennsylvania, where hunting rules allowed Ben to shoot at a younger age. These trips were a baseline that kept Ben going through grueling chemo and radiation therapy. But it was one phone call to Jordan that provided the boost to get through the worst. “When things got really shitty for him,” Stromecki recalls, “I could say ‘Hey Ben, suck it up; we’ve got this trip coming up. Just get through this surgery and then we can go.’ It gave him the inspiration he needed to get through the bad stuff.” And go they did – all the way to New Zealand, where Ben got a red stag and an Arapawa ram on one of several trips facilitated by Jordan and his group of supporting friends. “It gave him the drive to keep pushing forward,” Stromecki told me. Ben’s last successful hunt was about four months before he passed away. Stromecki now facilitates similar experiences for others.

As our visit came to an end, I felt refreshed. I’d seen life in the faces of young men and women because of the work they were doing in God’s creation with adults who inspired them and provided opportunities. When I thanked Jordan, he insisted that we were doing him a favor. “I hope schools that hear about this will say, ‘We can do some of that,’ and then do at least one thing.”