ANDERSON – Standing in the bricked Winner’s Circle in front of the track at Hoosier Park Racing & Casino, Ellen Taylor calls forward Erskine Elementary School fourth-graders two by two to share harness racing history facts from laminated cards.
The students then look for the places where the facts took place on a map of Indiana and affix their cards to a 5-foot paper timeline held up by two other students.
“The point of history is to learn from the past,” the director of Westfield-based Harness Horse Youth Foundation told the group of 30 students in the Freaky Feet Pete group.
Each of Anderson Community Schools’ 600 fourth-graders went on the special Indiana Horses for Youth field trip over two days last week at Hoosier Park. There the students learned about harness racing in Indiana, careers in agribusiness and toured the stables.
In addition, Hoosier Park is supplying coloring books to ACS kindergartners and first-graders.
The partnership is one of many ACS and individual schools have with local businesses.
The event was set up in five stations, including Meet the Athlete, which of course, is the horse; Dressing the Racehorse; A Bike, Not a Buggy! about the sulky driver; Heaps of Hoosier History; and It’s all Related.
Students also were served lunch and given gift bags containing a real horseshoe.
Zamarion Bryant, a fourth-grader at Erskine Elementary, said his favorite part was the visit to the stables, where he and the other students were allowed to pet 4-year-old Justice.
“I’m learning really a bunch,” he said.
Volunteers from the Daughters of the American Revolution also were on hand to help out and distribute pocket editions of the U.S. Constitution in honor of Constitution Day on Sept. 17.
The first-of-its-kind program at Hoosier Park is a Legacy Project of the Indiana Bicentennial Commission. Organizers said they hope to have conversations that will allow a similar program to be offered in the future.
“This year, with it being Indiana’s bicentennial, all of our grade levels are doing related activities,” said Erskine Elementary Principal Scott Merkel.
The reason fourth-graders were selected for the Hoosier Park trip, Merkel said, is because this is the year in which they learn Indiana history.
“They’ve done a really good job of incorporating state standards, academics, into their presentations,” he said. “This is a good exposure experience for all of them.”
Merkel said he was surprised at how many of his students have been horseback riding, shoed a horse or even owned a horse.
“We take for granted our kids don’t know about our rural economy,” he said.
Becky Young, vice president of marketing for Hoosier Park, said she came up with the idea for the field trip after Hoosier Park’s Mike Kase, who serves on the Indiana Bicentennial Commission, mentioned the possibility of a Legacy Project.
Many people tend to believe the history of harness racing started in Kentucky, and most would be surprised to learn it touches each of the Indiana’s 92 counties, Young said.
“Indiana has made a name for itself in racing long before Kentucky,” she said. “We wanted to show them how it began in Indiana.”
Local DAR President Beverly Duncan said she believed it was important to share with the students how the Constitution supports free enterprise, such as Hoosier Park. In addition, 90 percent of Americans work in the hospitality industry at one point in their lives, and so will many of ACS’s fourth-graders, she added.
“This world is built on free enterprise, and this is a great example of it,” she said. “Everything about this place is educational.”
Economic impact
According to the Equine Business Management Program at the Purdue Calumet School of Management, the economic impact of racing on Indiana’s economy in 2009, the latest year for which figures are available, was more than $319 million.
Direct and indirect employment touches about 3,000 Hoosiers.