On Earth Day, 40 Sehome High School students worked in small groups at a dirt patch behind the school. Slowly digging away, one group of 10th graders used shovels to uproot the blackberry bushes they had attempted to remove last fall. Others wore gardening gloves to clear the uprooted plants away. Although the students expressed frustration at having to dig up the blackberries a second time, most seemed to be working diligently.
"(We’re digging up blackberries) because they’re an invasive species and they ruin the ecosystem," sophomore Karen Frankenfeld said.
Ninety-five percent of Americans think environmental education should be in public schools, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. School teachers, city employees, nonprofit organizations and parents are working together to integrate environmental education into Bellingham schools, despite the lack of funding and flexibility to incorporate subjects that state testing does not cover.
Environmental education is not at its optimal level, said Craig Ferguson, a 10th-grade biology teacher at Sehome High School. Teachers lack the time to teach environmental issues, partly because of the preparation required to ready students for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning.
"Three-fourths of sophomore year is spent preparing for the WASL," Ferguson said.
Bellingham public school teachers like Ferguson are finding ways to incorporate environmental education into required curricula, however.
Ferguson said his classes’ Earth Day event was part of a bigger project that began approximately 10 years ago in the Outback, a community garden on Western Washington University’s south campus. It has evolved into a massive planting project at Sehome High School, funded by the school’s science department. Students and parents have spent hours clearing blackberry bushes and planting native species. They have planted more than 100 fir and alder trees on the site.
The city of Bellingham also is working to expose students to environmental education. For almost three years Kym Fedale, an environmental educator for the city, has led a fifth-grade program called Sharing Our Watersheds. Approximately 38 of the district’s fifth-grade classes participate in the program each year. Each class that participates in Sharing Our Watersheds receives a pre-trip talk, a field trip to the water-treatment plant and a visit to the wastewater-treatment plant. At the plants, students learn the components of watersheds, where the city’s water comes from and where it goes after use.
The city pays for transportation, a workbook for each student, a teacher’s manual and pre-trip videos. Each student aquires 10 hours of environmental education per year without cost to the school district. The city contributes $3,500 each year for transportation costs. A main goal of the watershed program is to incorporate WASL test questions into the district’s curriculum. The student workbook about the water cycle uses terms such as "evaporation," "condensation" and "precipitation," which are WASL components.
Traditional curricula don’t consider environmental education to be a fundamental subject, so schools with little state funding have to rely on teachers who have the drive to incorporate it, Fedale said. With the removal of funding issues and the addition of environmental expertise, schools can increase the presence of environmental education, Fedale said.
Jill Bailey, a second-grade teacher at Edison Elementary School in Burlington, said she would like to see more environmental education in schools. She said especially important topics are the impact humans have on the environment, toxins, population growth, the history and the future of the environment and the capability to resolve current problems.
"If we don’t teach the kids about what happened in the past and what could happen in the future... the future of our world will be negatively impacted," Bailey said.
Bailey’s son, Tommy Bailey-Chisholm, is a sophomore at Sehome High School. He recently finished a six-month project in Ferguson’s biology class. He and two classmates, Daniel Broker and Satchel Steele, created a nature sanctuary near his house.
Bailey-Chisholm said the most difficult part was clearing the blackberries. For Broker, using the rototiller was hardest because it was a muddy day, he said.
They used the foundation from a neighbor’s torn-down barn as the perimeter of the sanctuary. The pictures of the sanctuary site before their project show a complete covering of blackberry bushes. The three teenage boys worked for 25 hours to reveal a clean patch of land. After clearing the bushes, the boys planted native plants such as Oregon ash, ferns and red alder.
"Environmental education is on the upswing," Ferguson said.
Environmental education in schools is important because it gives students knowledge about what’s going on in the world and helps prepare them for the future, Bailey-Chisholm said.
"Environmental education is important for the next generations," Bailey-Chisholm’s classmate Erik Holgate said.
While Ferguson’s students study the environment, many teachers say Bellingham public schools lack environmental education.
"There is very little environmental education in (Bellingham’s public) schools," said Jackie Brown, a third-grade teacher at Alderwood Elementary.
The public-school administration pressures teachers to teach with the goal of high achievement on state standardized testing, in concurrence with the No Child Left Behind Act, Brown said.
From the school grounds to Padilla Bay, Brown’s third-grade students experience education outdoors. Representatives from RE Sources make paper with the class and teach students about recycling. Students raise salmon, working closely with members of the Nooksack Indian Reservation. The students also are working on an in-depth rocky-shore experiment. They compare high and low tides and explore how tides and oil spills affect the animals that live on the shore.
Though the class participates in a variety of projects, difficulties in teaching students about the environmental persist.
"Something challenging about environmental education is that (environmental problems are) very depressing," Brown said. "When we studied oil spills, this is when the students found themselves getting depressed, for we saw that there is no way to truly clean up an oil spill completely."
To overcome that obstacle, Brown focuses on remaining positive. She asks herself, "What do we want the future to look like?"
Brown’s advice to environmental educators is to focus on solutions. She also stresses that people don’t have to be teachers to make a positive impact on the environment. They should consider environmental issues no matter what their field of work is, she said.
Teachers like Ferguson and Brown and city employees like Fedale set examples of how to integrate environmental education into public-school curricula, creating a generation more conscious of its impact on the planet.
"We need to ask ourselves what we are educating for," Brown said. "We’re handing our children a planet in devastation. It is our responsibility to educate our children about the problems they will be facing."