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You can begin a career in floral design, interior plantscape, greenhouse, or wedding consultation at the TPS Natural Science Technology Center, located at 5561 Elmer Drive next door to the Toledo Botanical Gardens. This high school program is generally taken for 2 full years during your junior and senior year. Home schooled and students completing online courses for high school are welcome.

Natural Science Technology Center 5561 Elmer Drive, next to Toledo Botanical Gardens.
For further information or to receive an application contact the school at (419) 537-1198. Upon successful completion of each year in the program you will receive 1 science credit and 4 elective credits. In addition, up to 21 college credit may be earned through an articulation agreement with Hocking College. Students will utilize local parks and reserves in addition to the outdoor lab areas at the school. Outings include greenhouse tours, flower shop tours, wholesale house tours, district, state and national competitions. Studens last year placed first in the state Floriculture Career Development Event. Enrollment is limited for next fall. Classes begin August 26, 2010 and run Monday-Friday from 7:30AM-12:00 am.

Other programs featured at this school include Animal Management and Pet Grooming, Turf-grass and Landscape, as well as Natural Resources.

CiCis!

The first Cici’s Pizza night in December went really well. About 50 people came out to support the Natural Science Technology Center and included students and their families. We’re hoping that the next one on January includes students, their families and lots of NSTC supporters! It’s an easy way to support your favorite school and you don’t have to make dinner!

Food Drive!

The students at NSTC held a friendly competition to see which class could bring in the most non-perishable food items to donate to the Northwest Ohio Food Bank and the Pet Food Bank at Humane Ohio. The students collected over 300 pounds of food in a 2 week period. Both the Junior and Senior animal management classes tied for first place averaging 5 cans per student.

Natural Resources Update by Macie Zeller

During this time period if you walk by our class we would be doing Taxidermy. Taxidermy is the process of taking the insides out of mammals and stuffing them with cotton after all the fat and skin is cleaned out. This quarter we also learned about skulls. We learned how to age and tell the difference of the animal. We saw the skulls of various mammals such as deer, dogs, cats, minks, squirrels, eastern chipmunks and various different wildlife animals. Another thing we did is work on our home wildlife plan. In this plan we did a power point on animal census and planning for how we can get animals attracted to our yards. We pretended that we had all the money in the world to do this plan and most of our plans are coming out very well. We also studied very hard to get our greenhand and chapter degrees. It was hard work but everybody in Natural Resources received a degree. It was a fun period of the school year and we look forward to moving on in the year with more fun and lots of activities.

Landscape and Turf Teams With the Andersons

The Landscape and Turf program at NSTC is teaming up with The Andersons Research and Development Department, to conduct a very significant study of turf weed control products. The Andersons is in the process of developing a new weed control formulation, and requested the help of the Landscape and Turf program, as well as the Floriculture program.
The two programs at NSTC transplanted 1500 turf weeds into greenhouse containers, and have cared for them in the greenhouses for more than a month now. From here, the Andersons R&D personnel will come in and apply the experimental herbicide. They will be back to monitor the effectiveness of their product over the next 5-6 weeks.
This is a very exciting experiment because if this product does as well as intended, it will change the way that golf courses, landscapers and farmers apply pesticides, making it safer for all. This will most definitely grab the attention of the biggest pesticide companies and become a global product that was tested with the help of our Toledo Public Schools students. Watch for future articles about this exciting experiment.

Dog Obedience Graduation

Four students and their canine companions graduated from a 7-week dog obedience course offered to them after school hours. The purpose of this class is for students to learn techniques involving luring, positive and negative reinforcement in order to teach a dog to respond to basic obedience commands. Students also chose a fun trick to have their dog perform on the night of graduation. Anna the Yorkie gave an enthusiastic high-five. Bailey the Cocker did an army crawl through a tunnel fashioned out of a cardboard box. Willow this terrier mix jumped through a hoop. Most impressive was Poppy, the balloon popping Bichon who had to jump in a box to be rewarded with balloons to pop! This class is offered free of charge to the students. Tuition at other dog training schools is usually $120.00 for a similar program. All students received a graduation certificate indicating their level of competencies achieved.

Floriculture Update by Krista Woodruff

The month of December we really worked hard in Floriculture class! We took business tours of Lehmann’s Greenhouse and Pawlaczyk’s Holiday Wreaths ‘N Such because they are holiday vendors of ours. Lehmann’s was really cool because it was a big greenhouse where they had a lot of plants everywhere and they were mostly poinsettias. When we went to Pawlaczyk’s Holiday Wreaths N’ Such we saw how the workers made wreaths, grave blankets and grave pillows. Everyone couldn’t believe how fast they could make everything. The class had a fun time on these tours and learned a lot.
For the past month we have also been so busy completing orders and making the customers happy. We even designed the flowers for a wedding! The flower of the month was a 6 inch poinsettias and we delivered them to our Flower of the Month Club members. The month was eventful, it flew by so fast!