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March 13, 2015
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Throop student wins statewide environmental award
by Christopher Cornell ADVANTAGE EDITOR
A desire to help the environment can be nurtured if that person grows up in the right environment. That’s certainly what happened to Throop resident Emily Rinaldi, a Mid Valley High School graduate and a Keystone College senior who’s just about to get a degree in environmental resource management and environmental education. Her hard work in the classroom, and as a volunteer, was recently recognized when she was named an “Emerging Environmental Leader for Northeastern Pennsylvania” by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, which is sponsored by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and several private concerns. Among those Rinaldi credits for this accomplishment are “the outstanding and motivating” science teachers she had at Mid Valley. “My interest in science was sparked when I was in ninth grade and my teacher, Elaine Paulishak, got me involved with the Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science (PJAS),” she said. Rinaldi would compete in the PJAS for five years running, winning state and regional awards. Rinaldi got interested in environmental science in particular when another teacher, William Buza, introduced her to DCNR’s watershed program for high school students. “He and John Smolley also got me involved with the Lackawanna County Envirothon competition that year,” she said. She would compete in it for four years and she now volunteers as a score keeper for the competition. In addition, teacher Jane Evans took Rinaldi to the Pennsylvania Junior Science Symposium for two years in a row, so that she could present proj-
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ects she’d been working on. Buza and Evans then introduced Rinaldi to a professor from Penn State who studies avian migration habits at Lackawanna State Park. “I still volunteer with Dr. Margret Hatch of Penn State and Dr. Robert Cook of the University of Scranton at the State Park to this day,” she said. In addition to her teachers, she also credits her parents, Dominick and Patricia Rinaldi, and grandparents, the late Domenick Rinaldi and Joann Rinaldi of Dunmore and George Barbolish and the late Dorothy Barbolish of Throop. She calls them “the best role models I could have ever asked for. “In the professional world, Angela Lambert, Lackawanna State Park’s environmental educator, is by far my role model. I hope to be as good of a teacher and role Dr. David Coppola, Keystone College president, presents model someday as she is to me,” the Emerging Environmental Leader for Northeastern PennsylRinaldi said. vania award to Emily Rinaldi. How did she get the award? the rest of my family, my teachers and my friends “I was secretly nominated by three different people from DCNR, DEP and all deserve it as much as I do, because if it were Lackawanna County Conservation District that I not for their support and help I would have never have worked with before.” she said. She describes been successful. “I am proud of where I came from and was herself as “overwhelmed” when she got the call taught by my parents to honor the people who that she won. “It made me feel like all the work and volun- believed in you and helped you get to where you teering time I have done in the last nine years paid are now,” she continued. “I could not think of a better way to thank them than telling the valley off.” “This award really means something, not just that they teach in that they are doing a great job.” Rinaldi recently got hired by the Berks County for me but for my family, my high school, my college and my town,” she said. “I was not the only Conservation District as a conservation specialist. one that won this award. My parents, my sister, She starts in April.
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