Turtle gains in race to state status

State laws can get passed at a crawling pace - unless, that is, a troupe of turtle-loving fourth graders from Glenside Elementary gets involved.

When that happened yesterday, a slow-moving reptile won a closely watched race in the Pennsylvania legislature.

A Glenside-hatched plan to recognize the Eastern box turtle - which, the pupils are quick to tell you, is a threatened population - as Pennsylvania's state reptile passed the state House, 177-17, as the students eagerly looked on from the gallery.

"I'm pretty relieved that our hard work paid off," said Bradley Graul, sounding, at age 9, every bit like an experienced Capitol hand.

At this point, he's entitled to. His class of 28 has spent months lobbying for the Eastern box turtle - already the state reptile of North Carolina and Tennessee - to get this official Pennsylvania honor.

The quest began last fall, after a speaker told the class about the plight of the Eastern box turtle. The teacher, Linda Jephson, found in a later civics lesson that the class had a lingering chelonian interest.

"I was teaching them about the state symbols," Jephson said. "This is the state bird. This is the state dog. This is the state flower. They said, 'Do we have a state reptile?' I said, 'Well, no.' They said, 'Well, it should be the Eastern box turtle, because the population is dwindling.' "

The class' turtle interest also coincided with a visit by another guest at the Cheltenham Township school, State Rep. Lawrence Curry (D., Montgomery), who talked about the legislative process.

"I told them, 'Write letters to the [House's] members and keep talking about this issue, and I'll see what I can do,' " Curry said. "I didn't know if it was going to fly. And some people told me it was too risky to do anything, that I was going to be called a 'turtle head' and get killed in next year's campaign."

Eventually, the legislator stuck his neck out for the turtle plan and proposed it as a bill. The students kept pressing. They wrote to other legislators and made a poster for Curry, ever convinced they were lobbying for a noble goal.

"We decided if we did that, the turtles wouldn't be killed as much as they are now," said Julie Muhlfeld, 10 and an aspiring veterinarian.

The students have spent months learning about the perils endangering the Eastern box turtle - including lawn poisons, automobiles, human capture, and habitat destruction.

But it took a two-hour bus ride to Harrisburg yesterday to show them one more: rattlesnakes.

Specifically, the rattlesnake that a fifth grader from a school in Picture Rocks, Lycoming County, wanted to have crowned as the state reptile.

With the Glenside students watching, a proposal surfaced to shelve their Eastern box turtle idea for a time. The competing rattlesnake idea wasn't a formal bill yet, and anyway, there was a state budget to attend to.

The turtle backers persisted and, ultimately, prevailed, winning a hard-shelled majority and a trip to the Senate. If the Eastern box turtle can charm the Statehouse's upper chamber as decidedly as it did a couple dozen fourth graders in Glenside, it will be one Gov. Rendell signature away from official recognition. And that would likely happen.

"Naming the state's official reptile fills a void that most of us didn't even know existed," Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo said. "We compliment the House for pointing out the oversight."

Perhaps the governor's office would be better served complimenting Thomas Bassetti and his classmates for their determination over these many months. Who says modern children have short attention spans?

"It was really cool," said Bassetti, 10. "Usually we do a subject and we just move on."