Levee celebration set at Shawnee High School

Members of the Shawnee School District community are planning to honor a teacher and her students who have been working to promote awareness about the region's river levee system.

A Levee Celebration honoring teacher Jamie Nash-Mayberry and her students is planned Sunday, Feb. 5.

The celebration, which is open to the community, is scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. at Shawnee Junior-Senior High School at Wolf Lake.

Sunday's event is being coordinated by a Levee Celebration committee.

The Shawnee School District, farmers, friends, businesses and churches are working together on the celebration.

Levee Celebration committee chairperson Della McMahan-Shepard said the goal of Sunday's gathering is to honor Nash-Mayberry and her students "for an outstanding job of keeping the public aware of the Mississippi Levee needs in our area."

Students in Nash-Mayberry's history and government classes began to focus their energies on the river levees during the fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011. The work is continuing during the 2011-2012 school year.

The students began focusing attention on the status of the levees in 2010 after reading an article in The Southern Illinoisan newspaper in Carbondale. The article shared local resident Mitch McLane's concerns about levees in danger.

The students contacted Illinois legislators, the president and even Oprah Winfrey about their own concerns. Their contact with Winfrey was featured by the Associated Press. A YouTube commercial was made.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers heard about the work being done by the students and paid a visit to Shawnee High School. Local levee district commissioners came, too.

Levee summit meetings followed. Several hundred people attended the first summit, which was attended by legislators and representatives from the Corps of Engineers. Students helped to run the summit.

So far during the 2011-2012 academic year, the students have been invited by the Army Corps of Engineers to visit their headquarters in St. Louis.

At the request of Gary Rendleman, the teacher and her students attended a levee commissioner meeting. Commissioners asked the students for help, stating that they needed an additional $100,000 for a drainage system.

Students wrote letters to U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Ill., and also contacted the Delta Regional Authority, DRA, and Southern Five Regional Planning District – all were asked to work together to come up with the funding.

DRA subsequently announced the awarding of $100,000 to levee districts for a drainage system.

Recently, students began selling t-shirts to help raise money for the levee districts.