WALES – Most Oak Hill High School seniors lugged their year-end projects to school in backpacks, cardboard boxes or three-ring binders.
Nikole Lemay’s arrived in her dad’s pickup truck.
And it peed on the lawn.
“Jack!” Lemay said as she led the month-old Holstein calf around Friday. “Oh, boy.”
The calf’s fuzzy black ears and big brown eyes made him instantly forgivable. As he playfully butted Lemay’s hand, she – and many of the two dozen Oak Hill students who stood around her – gushed with delight.
There was a baby bull at school.
Traditional decline
For two months, Lemay and her classmates have worked on senior projects, long-term ventures designed to show how much they’ve learned and to prove they’ve met certain learning standards. Other teenagers made videos, created booklets or designed Web sites.
Lemay’s research project looked at the demise of Maine family farms. For the demonstration, she bought a day-old black-and-white calf to raise.
“I couldn’t believe it when she told me she wanted to buy a cow. I told her, Where I come from, people don’t buy cows; they buy cars,'” said her English teacher, Jeremy Young.
“Yeah,” said Lemay, feeding the calf a dandelion. “But he’s cuter than a car.”
A month later, Jack, named after Lemay’s sophomore English teacher (who taught the book “Animal Farm”), has grown into a 170-pound bull that likes to jump and play in the field and sometimes gets chased by Lemay’s jealous horse.
Although historically rural, Litchfield, Sabattus and Wales, the towns where Oak Hill students live, have lost many of their farms in recent years. Several of Lemay’s classmates said they’d never seen a cow, let alone a baby bull, up close.
A few girls stood off to the side, suddenly shy about petting the calf. Others fed him the hay and grain Lemay had brought.
Visiting kids
After the 20-minute show-and-tell, Lemay took the calf to the Greene preschool where she works afternoons. None of the 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds stood shyly off to the side.
Several called “moo.” A couple tried to wrap their arms around his neck for a hug.
“I think I’ve seen them far away,” said 5-year-old Paige Maheux. “It’s like you’ve never really seen one before, so it’s really cool.”
Lemay plans to attend college in the fall to study social services or veterinary work, and hopes eventually to have a farm of her own.
She isn’t sure what she’ll do with Jack now that her project is over. She will keep him on her family farm for the next several months at least, she said. After that, she expects he will be sold.
She figures most buyers will only want him for steak. It’s not a thought she likes.
“I’m really attached to him, so I wouldn’t want to eat him,” she said.
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