[Coral-List] request for a guest speaker

[Patti Nicoll]

Hello,
I teach 7th grade Life Science and sponsor an environmental club at our middle school in San Antonio, Texas. Our school, Saint Mary's Hall, is a Montessori - 12th grade college preparatory school. For the last few years we have been having an Earth week celebration which has involved home recycling drives, fund-raising for causes (usually marine related), contests to elect Green Kings and Queens, and a fair with local non-profits and vendors who share their particular knowledge with the students. It has always been a time-crunch and we feel that the students would be better served dropping the fair and having a guest speaker come to the school for an assembly. I would like this speaker to be someone who can speak on marine issues that relate to the Gulf of Mexico (as this is what our watersheds ultimately feed into) and its uniqueness, and could also update students on the the oil spill (or at least be prepared to answer questions that will likely crop up). Assemblies at our school are usually only about 30 minutes and have full access to multimedia support. We plan to schedule this event on Wednesday, April 13th. If there is a speaker that is willing to spend the day and could tailor 3 separate talks, I might be able to coordinate assemblies for all three branches of our school (lower, middle and upper). The school itself is between 900 and 1000 students. The middle school is about 220. I know we are small, but our school community consists of a group that can impact a great deal. I am also interested in the possibility of making this a TED youth event as I believe we have the resources to make this happen. In this case, you would be able to reach a very large audience. If there is anyone in our region that might be interested in this, will you please contact me? 
Sincerely,
Patti Nicoll
Saint Mary's Hall 
9401 Starcrest Dr
San Antonio, TX 78217
http://www.smhall.org
pnicoll at smhall.org