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>"In my experience, sharks haven't been anything like what people say about them — ‘they're bad, they're scary, they're monsters,'" Morris said.
>Since that first encounter she has spent thousands of hours exploring and documenting the world of sharks as a student, researcher, scuba instructor and videographer. And over time her childhood hunch about sharks being unfairly maligned developed into an ironclad conviction — and a drive to set the record straight.
>And yet there she was, on screen, surrounded by the silently gliding predators — sometimes 10 or more at a time — completely at ease. Audiences were captivated. When she took her presentation into classrooms, the students bombarded her with questions.
>"I realized, ‘OK, there's something to this,'" Morris said. She set out to create lessons aimed at dispelling shark myths, using her personal experiences, underwater footage and accurate scientific information about sharks. Her husband, filmmaker Duncan Brake, and their close friend, shark scientist Derek Burkholder, Ph.D., signed on for the challenge, and Sharks4Kids was born.
>"It was the three of us saying, ‘Right, we really love sharks. We love the ocean. And we want to make sure that we're going to continue to be able to see sharks,'" Morris said. Teaching kids to value and appreciate sharks and the ocean seemed like the best way to help ensure a future for the misunderstood and overexploited creatures.
>Technology presented an answer. Skype, the popular messaging application, began soliciting participants for its "Skype in the Classroom" series, offering an ideal virtual venue for Sharks4Kids' unique style of high-energy, lecture-meets-show-and-tell presentation. It didn't hurt that the Sharks4Kids team was already familiar with the app: "I live on a tiny island," Morris said, "so Skype is how I talk to everyone."
>They did not anticipate how popular the Skype lectures would be. Morris said it wasn't long until she was dialing in to 25-30 classes per week. Her cofounders, Brake and Burkholder, also host their share of Skype calls.
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>The students' eagerness is due in part to the information Morris shares in her talks — such as the statistic that 100 million sharks are killed by humans every year. But it's also due to her attitude. "Jillian is very enthusiastic and warm, and she backs it up with all kinds of expertise," Snoddon said. "The kids are really drawn to that." So drawn to it, in fact, that his class helped organize a second Skype session for several grades in the school gym. That session drew nearly 200 students and teachers.
>"Whenever Jillian is talking, it really comes through that she's talking to you individually," said sixth-grader Kennedy Lucas, 11. "She makes you feel that you have potential — that you're able to do anything you want."
>Since 2014, Sharks4Kids has hosted more than 700 Skype calls, connecting with 30,000 students in 47 U.S. states and 38 countries, including Kenya, Malaysia, China, South Korea and South Africa. Around two dozen Google Hangouts reached another 4,700 kids. Their in-person classroom visits have reached 16,300 kids in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and the Caribbean, and the organization has taken more than 300 students snorkeling with sharks or on shark-tagging trips.
>Burkholder said the next steps for the all-volunteer nonprofit group include securing more funding and adding more full-time staff — basically, treating Sharks4Kids more like a business than the "passion project" it began as several years ago.
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>And when that connection happens, even if it's just one student out of a hundred, she said it makes all the hard work and frustration of fighting for shark conservation worth it: "There's still so much fear of sharks, but when you connect with these kids it's like, ‘All right, we might just do this.' That gives us the hope to keep going."
>© Alert Diver — Q2 Spring 2017