Local students will soon have another way to study the environment. The Indian River School Board voted on Tuesday to approve a plan to build wetlands classrooms at two district schools. According to Center for the Inland Bays’ Sally Boswell, whose vision for outdoor education made this unique Delaware proposal possible, design will begin at Phillip Showell and Long Neck Elementary Schools next month.
“I’m thrilled,” Boswell said after the meeting Tuesday night. “This is a project I have been working on for a couple of years. It’s going to broaden our education program, taking it to more students and getting the community involved.”
According to officials, students will be involved in the design, construction and maintenance of the wetlands. Officials from Environmental Concern, a Maryland-based organization that helped secure funding for the program, plan to visit next month to tour the schools and decide on a best location and preliminary design for the project, Boswell said.
An ideal design would be one that meets stormwater drainage needs — the wetlands will be used to catch polluted storm water before it reaches Delaware’s waterways — and maximizes the area.
During the design and construction phases, students will study native plants and decide on the type of habitats to be included in the wetlands, according to one official. They will then plant in and around the wetlands — all native species, some to possibly attract amphibians and others to attract butterflies — when the project is completed in the late spring of 2007, Boswell said.
“Children have a natural curiosity” for the environment, said Boswell, who is the center’s education and outreach coordinator. “If you reach them when they’re young enough, they are very enchanted by the outdoors. It seems really important to take advantage of the fact that these kids have this natural affinity.”
An Environmental Concern publication available to Indian River School District also features activities around the wetlands for all grade levels and subject areas that are directly correlated to Delaware state standards. Principals from both schools and other school officials supported the idea to enhance outdoor education.
“I am an advocate of that kind of thing,” Bunting said in an earlier interview. “If we don’t value the environment, then we aren’t conscious of how our actions and mis-actions impact the future of the environment.”
“We’ve got to work with the administration. We’ve got to get teachers to buy into this idea,” added Steve Cardano, Indian River’s science coalition specialist, also in an earlier interview. “It involves getting kids outside to look at the life. It’s a great concept.”
Studies including one by the California-based State Education and Environment Roundtable show that this type of outdoor learning — already in place in a host of Maryland schools — helps improve standardized test scores and discipline.
“When you combine students to their schoolyard, the learning is just multiplied,” said Bronwyn Mitchell said in an earlier interview.
Mitchell, Environmental Concern’s director of education, has worked with numerous Maryland schools to promote these schoolyard wetland habitats — all of which are different and different-looking. “Academic achievement goes up, behavioral problems go down.”