Hélis, the scarred, snow-white beluga who appeared in the Delaware River, created a learning opportunity for Florence Township School District students.
By: Scott Morgan
FLORENCE All right. You know about the whale in the Delaware.
But have you considered the educational opportunities made possible by a 30-year-old beluga who happens to wander into a river 500 miles south of the rivers he should be wandering into?
Well, the presence of Hélis, the scarred, snow-white beluga who popped up in the Delaware River April 11 and made a vacation spot of the waters between Trenton and Beverly for a week or so, not only captured a lot of local attention but also generated quite a bit of applied knowledge for students in the Florence Township School District.
For Michelle Darrah’s seventh-grade math class, Hélis turned out to be the perfect teaching tool.
Last week, Ms. Darrah started teaching her class about ratios and proportions, when up pops Hélis on Monday afternoon. The following morning, a newspaper graphic describing the size and weight of male and female beluga whales lands on Ms. Darrah’s doorstep. Her reaction: "What a teachable moment. He swam right into our classroom."
Ms. Darrah used the graphic to teach a class full of uncommonly eager students that male and female beluga whales are actually proportionally even. Though adult males are longer and heavier, averaging 13 feet and 3,300 pounds, average adult females are exactly four-tenths that big.
"It was only one class," Ms. Darrah said, "but it was a great class."
While Ms. Darrah’s class didn’t actually go whale watching, Melissa Neiheisel’s fifth-grade class from the Marcella L. Duffy School did, and even ended up on local TV news. It was during a lunch period last week that someone announced Hélis was down by the township marina off Front Street. The class raced to the waterfront and, over 15 minutes, got to see Hélis come up four or five times.
"You wouldn’t believe how white it is," Ms. Neiheisel said. "The kids thought it would be off-white, but it’s blinding white."
The lesson wasn’t in color recognition, of course. It was about geography. Tracking Hélis from his more common digs in the North Atlantic to township waters, she said, has given the kids a reason to study geography. Do they like it?
"They absolutely love it," she said. And if he shows up again, she said, they’re going to run right back to the water.
Ms. Neiheisel might not get the chance, since Hélis seems to have headed south, back toward the Atlantic. He’s not been seen in the area since Monday. But while he was here, he did give the district’s kids a thrill.
Dennis Helkowski, who teaches autistic children in Duffy’s fourth and fifth grades, said he and his students actually got to see Hélis spout off the Beverly coast, after a mad dash from Trenton early last week.
"We actually went on a whale hunt," Mr. Helkowski said. "The kids were jumping out of their seats, wanting to see a whale. They’re used to seeing goldfish in tanks."
In the classroom, Mr. Helkowski said, the kids used Hélis to study animal classifications, identifying him as a mammal and not a fish. But despite the fact that he thought seeing a whale in the wild was really cool, the big reward for Mr. Helkowski was that the kids got "a great life experience" out of the beluga’s visit.
"Just to see them happy was the thing," he said.
And while he’s sad to see the whale go, he keeps his hopes up for the future.
"Maybe we’ll get another one back in 20 years or so," he said.

