What Every School Needs: A Zombie Survival Club



Last Halloween, I did a blog post about how Westlake Ace Hardware and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were using zombies as part of their respective public outreach campaigns. Not wanting to be left out of the zombie apocalypse preparedness movement, John Deere Middle School in Moline, IL has created their own "Zombie Survival Club" in time for this year's Halloween.

According to the Quad-Cities Online news site, "Zombie Survival Club is made available through a partnership between Lights ON for Learning 21st Century Community Learning Centers and the Moline Public Library. ... The program was created by Jan Laroche, the teen services librarian who has an interest in Zombie movies and recognized the trends in teen literature about zombies. She says the club will focus on STEM lessons (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in a fun setting. 'Zombie Survival Club is intended to be a lighthearted, activity based program that develops educational skills through a fun after school curriculum.'" Click here to read the full story, and you can see the video report about the club that aired on WTVR here.

From what I've read and seeing the video report, the Zombie Survival Club is a variation on the CDC's zombie apocalypse campaign that I wrote about last year that's aimed at a younger audience. While practical, real-life emergency survival information is incorporated into the club's teaching materials, you can't go wrong with an educational program where kids can proudly say, "We learned what weapons to use to kill some zombies."

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