The Roadkill Queen

With critters dead and living, Francia Smith makes nature real.

By MELANIE AVE, Times Staff Writer
Published September 20, 2007

Cheyenne Rainey, 10, isn't sure about the tarantula skin being held up by teacher Francia Smith, a.k.a. the Spider Lady. Ms. Smith wants her young students to get close to nature.
	[SCOTT KEELER | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [SCOTT KEELER | Times] Francia Smith talks to fourth-graders from Clearview Elementary at Sawgrass Lake Park. "I believe in a hands-on experience for students," says Smith, who has been opening young eyes to nature for 33 years. [SCOTT KEELER | Times] Ms. Smith was bitten by the nature bug as a child, and still loves the outdoors at 65.

ST. PETERSBURG - The little girl who tromped through the woods grew up to be the little woman who tromped through the woods.

Francia Smith has been exploring the outdoors as a teacher for some 33 years - 13 of them at Hillsborough County's Nature's Classroom - bringing children along with her and teaching them what she knows about water, dirt, plants and critters.

Some call the animated 65-year-old with the long gray ponytail "Spider Lady" or "Roadkill Queen." Her real title is elementary environmental school resource teacher, one of two in Pinellas County.

Two of the necklaces she wears contain dead spiders. Another holds a rattlesnake backbone from which an alligator paw droops.

She wears them to elicit questions from young minds.

As expected in nature, the circle of life moves. And now, so must the Roadkill Queen.

This school year may be her last, she thinks, after teaching an estimated 1-million children in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.

She worries, though.

Who will care for her zoo-like classroom filled with live and dead animals collected over years and years? But more importantly, who will tromp in the woods with children who prefer computer games to climbing trees? Who will show them the joy of watching a nursery web spider sit with an egg sac or hearing the cicadas sing or touching a toe-biter bug without getting bitten?

* * *

Outside Sawgrass Lake Park, 28 fourth- and fifth-graders from Clearview Avenue Elementary sit cross-legged around her feet.

Ms. Smith moves back and forth and up and down in her stained white shoes, holding a walking stick. As a child growing up in Connecticut, she made a similar walking stick with her Irish grandfather. It was he who opened her eyes to nature.

"I'm a teacher just like your teachers," she tells the children. "But I'm luckier than they are, at least I think so."

Soon, she says, they will go inside and see her classroom.

"I got stuff," she laughs. "Cute stuff. Good stuff. I have live stuff you can hold.

"For those of you who don't look so happy, I even have dead stuff."

A boy in a bright green shirt pumps his arm in the air: "Awesome!"

For the last 15 years, Ms. Smith has taught from a classroom at the park with its 400 acres of maple swamp sliced by boardwalks, trails and canals. Fourth-graders from public schools south of Ulmerton Road cycle through on half-day field trips.

It's never enough time, she thinks, but Ms. Smith makes the most of it by trying to pique their curiosity and turn them into scientists with every tree hole and hawk nest they see.

Ms. Smith, a married mother of three, grandmother of four and boat captain, planned to retire last year but chickened out.

She frets about the sometimes precarious funding for the environmental program, which is jointly supported by the Pinellas County School District and the Southwest Florida Water Management District.

Raina O'Neil, a coordinator with Swiftmud, says the program is fortunate to have a teacher like Ms. Smith. "She's got such enthusiasm and passion for what she does."

While Ms. Smith has a science degree, she says she's mostly self taught, describing herself as a "lifelong learner." She has reached near cult status for her vast knowledge of spiders.

* * *

Inside Ms. Smith's "magic classroom," the children settle into chairs arranged in a circle in the middle of the room. They can't keep their eyes off the shelves and aquariums that line every wall.

The roadkill collection includes birds, bats, mosquitoes, alligators, spiders, snakes, turtles, a bobcat. There are skulls and skins, tails and wings.

Much of it is donated. Some of it she collected before permits were needed to collect roadkill.

She encourages the children to smell a skunk pelt for a hint of the animal's perfume.

Among the dead, there also are 44 live animals she says can no longer survive in the wild, including a one-eyed owl, an unsociable hedgehog and a countless number of mealworms.

The animals don't have nicknames because she wants the kids to learn about the animals, not their made-up names.

She encourages them to touch, except those encased in glass. When she pulls out a molten tarantula, Cheyenne Rainey, 10, squirms to the side of her chair, twists her face and lets out a loud, "Ugh." The class laughs.

"Ah, Cheyenne," Ms. Smith coos. "What's wrong?"

"I don't like spiders," the girl says.

"That's okay. They don't like you either."

When she pulls a red rat snake from a cage, a brave few let it twist through their arms. Jodi Herbert, 11, sits straight-backed as the reptile slithers.

"Don't forget to breath," Ms Smith says, touching the girl's shoulder.

* * *

As the field trip nears its end, Ms. Smith leads the children to water's edge where they transform into aquatic biologists.

With nets and a checklist of fish and bugs they might find, the children scoop through the water trying to see what's there so they can determine if the ecosystem is healthy.

They catch minnows, freshwater shrimp, spiders, and damselfly nymphs.

"I've never done anything like this," says Mayi Figueroa, 11, unloading a net full of animals into a bucket. "It's interesting."

Ms. Smith smiles like a proud parent as the little biologists try to catch critters.

"Kids today," she says, "they just don't get enough of this."

Melanie Ave can be reached at 727 893-8813 or mave@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 20, 2007, 00:19:44]