Alexandra Kennon Shahin
Barry Guillot has made an impact in St. Charles Parish bringing education out into the wetlands.
Over the course of a two-hour conversation with Barry Guillot at the St. Charles Parish East Regional Library—twenty people, including colleagues, parents, and students, gleefully interrupted us to say hello and get their bear hug. The conservationist and educator’s recent retirement from the public school system closes a thirty-year legacy of immersive, ecology-focused teaching at Hurst Middle School in St. Charles Parish, but Guillot’s impact reverberates far beyond the physical classroom. And though he’s retiring, he still has plenty of work to do.
Guillot’s connection to Louisiana’s natural world emerged early in his life. “My dad and my grandfather always loved going fishing, so we spent a lot of time out there in the big canal behind my house, go[ing] crawfishing all the time,” Guillot recalled. “We’d go down to Lafitte and watch the swamp tour boats pass.”
These adventures culminated in spectacular stories Guillot still loves telling: “Did you hear about how I got chased by an alligator? That definitely put me in love with alligators.” That Guillot is in love with alligators is an understatement: his right bicep bears a tough-looking tattoo of a snarling one. The animal's drawn lips reveal his teeth as he glares at onlookers, fist raised, flexing his own muscular bicep.
This particular tale is set in a flatboat just north of Slidell, when a pre-teen Guillot and a friend stopped to photograph a nest of baby alligators. “All of a sudden we heard—it sounded like a dog growling—and we looked around and the marsh started parting! The only way I can describe it is like in Jurassic Park, when the velociraptors were running and started coming.” From that moment on, Guillot wanted to learn everything he could about the Louisiana alligator. He found the library’s dusty old books about the ancient creatures to be less exciting than experiencing the angry mama gator in real life. So Guillot allowed his curiosity to lead him more frequently into the wild, as well as into conversations with his elders about the way the land used to be.
“How do we get the kids out of school, disconnected from technology? How do we get [them into] really hands-on stuff? Here we are reading about wetlands, and we have this place where we can go feel it, stick our hands in the mud and be a part of it.” —Barry Guillot
He recalls his grandfather-in-law gesturing out across the fishing ponds in Bayou Gauche, asking him to imagine their past lives as cattle pastures, where he and his friends played baseball. These lost pastures are a casualty to subsidence and flooding in the area. Guillot also recalled a comical story watching his grandfather-in-law hunt pouldeau from his back porch in Terrytown. Shotgun in hand, he would wait for the birds to fly over. When they did, he would take his shot, then run through his house to the other side as they flew overhead, and catch them in front of the house, too. These stories and experiences in the fresh air did more for Guillot than the traditional desk-bound learning, as he would later learn was also true for other students.
Guillot started college in 1985 at the University of New Orleans and embarked on National Guard training. He worked as a bouncer and bartender, with an eye on entering the tourism industry—until he tried his hand at substitute teaching, where he earned the monikers ‘Kindergarten Cop’ and ‘Father Goose,’ because kids would follow him around school. The satisfaction he felt in the classroom inspired him to switch his major to education. He served for six years as a soldier in the National Guard before working his way up to army sergeant. He completed his education degree in 1991 and started working as a full-time teacher in Jefferson Parish public schools that year.
It didn’t take long for Guillot’s school administrators to recognize his immersive teaching style. “By the end of [that first] year, I had fifteen aquariums in the [class]room, and the kids would [observe animals] with clipboards [to] take quizzes and tests,” he said.
Alexandra Kennon Shahin
Barry Guillot is known as "The Gator Man" among his students, who have followed him into the wetlands, seeing wildlife up close.
At the time, he was also working as a volunteer at the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans, developing education programs such as “ZZZ’s in the Seas,” during which families would participate in a variety of activities and sleep overnight at the aquarium, and “Breakfast with the Fishes,” which served families breakfast in the Gulf of Mexico gallery while viewing the sharks, then took them on a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility. Curator of Education Laura Maloney and Assistant of Education Chuck Remington eventually convinced Guillot to write educational programming for the aquarium full-time. He did this for a period before ultimately returning to the classroom, leaving Jefferson Parish for St. Charles. “It was a fantastic job where I could really think out of the box and create adventures for thousands of aquarium members,” Guillot said.
Guillot’s two most famous programs, though, were the LaBranche Wetland Watchers and Swamp School—both initiatives directed towards fostering an appreciation of and interaction with local wetlands for area youth. “How do we get the kids out of school, disconnected from technology? How do we get [them into] really hands-on stuff?” Guillot asked. “Here we are reading about wetlands, and we have this place where we can go feel it, stick our hands in the mud and be a part of it.”
“One of the most rewarding things is to be in Walmart and to see the kids in front of me with cast nets, and they say, ‘Mr. Gator Man! Mr. Gator Man!’" —Barry Guillot
Guillot started the LaBranche Wetland Watchers in 1997 after being introduced to service learning by UNO’s Dinah Maygarden and the Lake Ponchartrain Basin Foundation, where he met environmentalist Milton Cambre. “After seeing some of the things Mr. Milton was trying to do in the LaBranche Wetlands, I wanted to bring all my students out there so they could experience the lessons. I wanted them to go get their hands muddy and be able to see wildlife in real time instead of on video.” Almost thirty years later, the LaBranche Wetland Watchers continues to operate as an internationally recognized service-learning project for sixth through eighth grade students of St. Charles Parish and beyond. Guillot guides his Watchers, using the scientific method in real time, as they learn how to analyze data from their water quality monitoring in the Wetland Watchers Park in Norco, before returning to class to report their findings. He also instructs his Watchers on how to handle exotic animals that they’re studying, and gets on the ground with them to plant trees or conduct cleanups in wetland protection efforts. Every October, the group also hosts a live theater fundraiser for the park’s ongoing maintenance called the Haunted History Hike, where guests learn about the people who called the swamps home. Guillot’s Watchers are responsible not only for regularly presenting their knowledge and research at schools, festivals, and conferences, but also for training the younger students entering the program after them.
Guillot started Swamp School in 2011 with educator Craig Howat. While there is some crossover between the LaBranche Wetland Watchers and Swamp School, the latter functions more as a summer camp. Today with the partnership of St. Charles Parish Parks and Recreation, the camp embraces students across the U.S., at one point boasting kids from seven different states. In fact, Swamp School is so popular that recently the difficulty of securing a spot was compared to snagging a Taylor Swift Era’s Tour ticket. Guillot and Howat, donning large hats, slathered-on bug spray, and sunscreen, invite kids into all the inexpensive regional recreation available in the area: fishing, crabbing, tree-planting, canoeing, net casting, archery, and hiking.
“One of the most rewarding things is to be in Walmart and to see the kids in front of me with cast nets, and they say, ‘Mr. Gator Man! Mr. Gator Man!’” said Guillot. “Sometimes the parents or grandparents will text pictures of them throwing cast nets at Grand Isle, or of their kids holding fish that they caught. We hope that they're going to teach their kids these skills [because] these were skills that we learned just from hanging out with our friends.”
Through these programs, Guillot and volunteers have devoted over 250,000 hours of service to the LaBranche Wetlands. Over 45,000 students have benefitted from the programs, and have had the opportunity to make an impact, planting over 15,000 trees and plants and collecting over 10,000 bags of trash.
In addition to his on-the-ground work in conservation and education, Guillot also reaches youth through his 2019 book, Who Lives in Louisiana Wetlands? The story presents children with a bilingual guide for learning to count. When published, it was the only book written in both English and Niihau (pronounced NEE-ah-HOW), an endangered Hawaiian language and dialect. In collaborating with a Niihau charter school in Hawaii, Guillot realized that this was more than just a book: it was an opportunity to bond over shared values like family and cuisine, as well as environmental appreciation and protection.
Guillot’s countless accolades, which include being a four-time recipient of the Louisiana Wildlife Federation Conservation Educator of the Year Award, are even more impressive in light of his ongoing battle with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a diagnosis he received in 2018. Confronting Guillot’s drop foot and paralyzed leg, doctors confirmed the rare, incurable, and sometimes fatal disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system. It was while he was learning how to walk again post-paralysis that he got his alligator tattoo, a reminder to stay resilient and to keep fighting. “I just love how powerful and beautiful they are,” he said of his muse.
During his retirement Guillot plans to spend time visiting natural history museums, taking his family on fossil hunting trips across the U.S., and facilitating Wetland Watchers through St. Charles Parish Schools as a volunteer, as well as co-facilitating Swamp School summer camps. He’ll also continue to operate his business, Reptile Krewe LLC: Animal Encounters, through which he and his former students bring reptiles—snakes, bearded dragons, turtles, tegus, iguanas, tortoises—to events, ranging from children’s parties to weddings.
“It’s been a really, really rewarding life,” Guillot reflected. “I’m just so thankful that I’ve been in a position to… have that kind of impact on so many people.”
