Life skills through chicken care

ALEXANDRIA SCHOOL

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IN a courtyard at Walt Whitman Middle School in Virginia, a 14-year-old with a purple buzz cut cradled a chicken in her arms. "Her name is Betsy," Maicy Nealy, an eighth-grader at the Alexandria school.

As a young child, Nealy was afraid of chickens. Now she spends hours after school collecting their eggs and cleaning the coop for the school's five hens.

The chicken program at Whitman started about a year ago when after-school program specialist Lee Maguire planned a month-long embryo development program for kids to learn about biology and anatomy. Maguire runs a variety of programs but has an affinity for agriculture.

The egg incubator soon became a mainstay at the campus in spring 2024. As the eggs hatched, so did interest among Whitman students, who filed in and out of Maguire's office to see the fetuses developing and then started visiting him to pet the babies.

Whitman staff saw how much the kids enjoyed spending time with the chickens and decided to keep them around indefinitely, Maguire said.