Each year the Dallas Safari Club and the Dallas Ecological Club choose an Outdoor Adventures teacher for their Educator of the Year award. This year Allen’s archery coach Jason Anderson was the recipient.

“[The clubs] each year look at a different teacher who does a great job in the classroom and promotes Outdoor Adventures,” Anderson said. “Lucky me, I guess I was chosen this year.”

Outdoor Adventures is a new course that was added to the curriculum in 2010. Students are able to choose this as an alternative to a physical education class. The administration added this course partly because the PE classes were at maximum capacity in years past.

“The administrators were very excited because our PE classes were overloaded. Our PE teachers were swamped with 50 kids a class on both campuses,” Anderson said. “So this class took 550 kids out of those gyms per year. So now our PE classes don’t have 60 kids, they’re down to 25 or 30 students. They’re a much more manageable group.”

Anderson puts in many hours at Lowery and the main campus to provide all students with the course. Most of his students are main campus students, who bus to Lowery to take part in the class. He and other teachers spend after school hours and weekends coaching the teams and tournaments.

“For the last three or four years, getting this program together, I work all the time.

This is a seven day a week job,” Anderson said. “We can’t have fishing tournaments during the week or shooting team tournaments, so all that’s on the weekends. I’m here all week long and then on Saturdays, I’m either at a fishing tournament [or] an archery tournament. Sundays, the same thing.”

For all the extra work Anderson puts into this class, he takes many students to extra-curricular tournaments and even to state championships. This year, the archery team won state.

“This year we had about 140 students on the archery team. That’s what we started out with,” Anderson said.

Anderson said his main goal wasn’t to win the award but to set up a course to teach students about the outdoors.

“My main focus was building a program for Allen ISD that our kids could learn about the outdoors and learn about the ethics of hunting and fishing and all the other things that come with it,” Anderson said. “The award, that’s just icing on the top. My main goal was to get this program working, and I want to continue to keep it going for the future of Allen and Allen students.”