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CommunityEducators get together for green summit
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
Karen Mullin of the Maryland Association of Environmental and Outdoor Educators talks about how to select native plants for school butterfly gardens last week at the Schoolyard Habitat and Green Schools Summit at Kings Landing Park in Huntingtown.
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The Schoolyard Habitat and Green School Summit, held June 18 at Kings Landing Park in Huntingtown, brought teachers and others together to share strategies for making nature come alive to students.
At one ‘‘roundtable discussion” representatives from schools and environmental education groups traded tips while enjoying the shade of a couple of cedar trees on the park’s front lawn.
The moderator, Steve Heacock of the Carroll County Outdoor School, gave participants advice on keeping their programs open during a time of budget cuts and the ‘‘institutional anxiety — maybe institutional psychosis, institutional insanity” about standardized tests and other new graduation requirements.
Environmental issues are ‘‘things we think are important, but that may not be to those higher up in the monkey tree than most of us, and these are the ones who make the decisions,” Heacock said.
Be armed with the latest educational research during visits with higher-ups, he told them. The outdoor school also reviewed its materials and removed all references to ‘‘extension” or ‘‘enrichment,” as programs seen as peripheral are the first to go.
‘‘This is essential education,” he said.
Environmental educators need to work with, rather than fight against, today’s obsession with test scores, participants said, by demonstrating that their programs can boost scores in basic subjects. This seems to be correct — test scores at ‘‘green schools,” or schools that emphasize environmental education and action, are higher than at regular schools even after socioeconomic factors are taken into account, according to Nancy Merrill, executive director of the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education. MAEOE sponsored the green summit.
But administrators may still need to be convinced. Program survival requires ‘‘a curricular connection, how actions to become a green school will meet those [testing] standards,” said Karleen Vollherbst with Environmental Concern.
Heacock also urged programs to seek out mutually-beneficial ‘‘partnerships” instead of ‘‘sponsorships” where educators have to go ‘‘hat in hand” to ask for resources. As an example, Heacock told a story about his outdoor school’s interactions with the owner of a plant nursery. Originally, the owner was only interested in what he could sell, but what he learned from the school about native plants helped his business thrive. Now, the nursery donates plants to the school and its owner has become an advocate for the school and for native landscaping, Heacock said.
‘‘I am convinced the human resource is the greatest resource,” he said.
Sometimes well-meaning teachers need help — or think they need help — teaching about the environment, so that ‘‘handholding” by experienced environmental educators becomes important, participants said.
‘‘All teachers can do it, but they don’t believe they can do it. ... Really it is truly handholding and being there,” Merrill said.
Besides talking about broad strategies, educators could also join workshops to learn practical skills. Karen Mullin, MAEOE’s schoolyard habitat coordinator, gave a presentation on how to create butterfly gardens.
Standing among potted demonstration plants, Mullin led her audience in deciphering the sometimes-confusing names of nursery plants by helping them decide which of many botanical names for the black-eyed Susan would make an environmentally appropriate addition to a garden.
Caution is essential, she said.
‘‘You are planting these to support native insect and bird populations. ... As soon as you start throwing stuff in [that] you don’t know, you just don’t know” what the consequences will be, she said.
Selecting native plants suited to the location is important, also: ‘‘All soil will support something. It’s just a question of, will it support what you want,” Mullin said.
Among the plants she displayed and recommended were black-eyed Susan, bee-balm, goldenrod, blue flag iris and sweet pepperbush. She gave some of the plants to grateful listeners after the presentation.
Mary Bolen and Carolyn Jones-Slappy, both assistants at Huntingtown Elementary School, came to the summit to get ideas for a science club they help manage as well as to network, they said.
‘‘We’re already doing a bluebird trail. We wanted to make sure we hadn’t missed the latest information. We hadn’t,” Bolen said.
The pair will be working with students to restore an overgrown garden at the school — last year they advised kids on growing ‘‘pizza gardens” with basil, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions and other pizza ingredients, they said.
‘‘We’re just sorry we could only have two [workshops] because there was so much interesting stuff. Oh well, there’s always next year,” Bolen said.
To bring the event to a close, former state Senator Bernie Fowler led participants into the Patuxent River, a smaller reenactment of his annual ‘‘wade-in” at Broomes Island which took place two weeks ago. They only made it two steps into the water, a reflection on the river’s abysmal water quality.
‘‘There’s no hallucination going on here — we have a very sick river,” Fowler said.
But he ended on a lighter note, thanking the educators for their work.
‘‘I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart, I am very, very grateful for what you do,” he said.
