High school students on a 2024 fall field trip in the Quimper Wildlife Corridor in Port Townsend.
School’s out, and Jefferson Land Trust is wrapping up our 13th year of great youth education programming!
Elementary school students on a field trip to Valley View Forest in fall 2024.
Our highly valued, place-based education programs are developed in collaboration with local teachers to support classroom curriculums, to align with state standards, and to build on each other year after year, carrying students from elementary school through senior year. We’re proud to offer all our popular programs to public schools at no cost.
Check out this “by the numbers” overview of our youth education programs over the 2024-25 school year:
“This school year was great,” says Devon Buckham, the Land Trust’s Education Coordinator. “We were able to run all the programs we’ve run in the past, and pilot some new programs too.”
Students on a golden morning in the Quimper Wildlife Corridor during a fall 2024 field trip.
Field trips that support what students are learning in the classroom are the core elements of our youth education programming. These hands-on outdoor learning experiences, which we run on Land Trust preserves across East Jefferson County, provide local students with the vital opportunity to learn on the land in meaningful and impactful ways, and to connect deeply with the natural heritage of their home lands. But our education offerings don’t stop there: we also offer in-classroom visits, teacher support, and more.
Read on to see how we’re growing our programs, expanding accessibility, supporting local teachers, and more!
This year, we expanded the grade levels we serve from third through 12th to include kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades at Chimacum.
While many of our programs, which are mostly science-based, are well-established parts of curricula, we also piloted a few exciting new programs this past year, and are excited to be expanding our programming beyond the sciences.
Students are all smiles on the trail at Valley View Forest during a fall 2024 field trip.
This year’s new programs included a language arts class for high schoolers (who collected data in the Quimper Wildlife Corridor to create specific arguments about future land use) as well as an ethnobotany program for 3rd-grade students. We’re also developing an 8th-grade interdisciplinary climate impact unit connecting math, science, and language arts classrooms through project-based learning.
We were also pleased to provide support for the school garden program in Quilcene this past year.
The place-based education we offer not only helps students learn and build real-world skills, but also has the potential to make a deep and lasting impact on students’ wellbeing and their sense of belonging.
Education Coordinator Devon (left) and Preserve Manager Carrie arrive on site early to map out the field trip trail route for the day in fall 2024.
“We want students to connect to this place,” says Devon. “So every time they see that plant they’ve touched and smelled and learned about on a field trip when they’re out in their local community, they feel a connection. The more connections we can build for these students, the more they’ll see a place in this community for themselves and feel that sense of belonging that every community member should feel.”
Devon says that one of the biggest metrics for success is the glowing feedback he hears from parents whose children are excited about what they’ve experienced on Land Trust field trips — and are eager to take their families to visit Land Trust preserves. “Students aren’t just taking these experiences back to the classroom, but taking them home to their families as well,” he says.
A wheelchair-accessible trail in Valley View Forest leads from the parking lot to the community pavilion, where students can rest and take shelter during field trips.
A rising focus of our present education work is expanding accessibility for all students by designing and adapting programs, activities, and field trip plans to serve students with different needs.
“That means adapting our programs to address the needs of students with mobility challenges, and also students with specific behavioral needs,” Devon explains. “We’ve had great success running field trips for mobility-challenged students at our preserves. And we’re ‘getting the worksheet out of the way’ by encouraging students of all learning styles to engage in activities that are hands-on and engage different senses.”
Local high school student measuring trees at a fall 2024 field trip in the Quimper Wildlife Corridor.
For example, this school year, we further refined our “forest math” program (in its second year) that brings students out of the traditional classroom and onto forested Land Trust preserves to solve hands-on, real-world math problems. A program like this one is a good example of how we’re striving to meet different learning styles and needs in our programming.
As we grow and adapt our existing programming to serve more students, we’re working with groups like the Port Townsend Special Education Steering Committee to address barriers to access; collaborating with Chimacum’s Director of Student Inclusion to ensure programs meet the needs of all learners; providing classroom-based alternatives for students unable to attend field experiences; and more.
Local teacher Matt during a Land Trust weekend workshop at Valley View Forest.
Devon, a former classroom teacher, is excited about the ways the Land Trust is working to bolster support for teachers.
In partnership with staff from the National Park Service’s Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance program, we’ve developed a toolkit to help local educators easily connect with environmental education providers in our community. The toolkit includes searchable, grade-specific program information, contact details, and alignment to district needs.
As part of this effort, we’ve created a collaborative group called East Jefferson Education Network, which includes North Olympic Salmon Coalition, Port Townsend Marine Science Center, CedarRoot Folk School, Northwest Watershed Institute, and the Washington Native Plant Society. This system collects provider information that feeds into a central database, which auto-generates PDF summaries for educators, acting as a centralized reference resource or “toolkit”.
A draft version of the toolkit has been created, and we’re currently collecting feedback from teachers, with an overwhelmingly positive response from them so far. We’re planning our second partner meeting for late July and are on track to officially publish the toolkit before the start of the coming school year.
Local students and their teacher observing the salmon at a field trip to Duckabush Oxbow and Wetlands Preserve in Brinnon in 2023.
And that’s not all. “We’re currently waiting on approval from the state to be a ‘clock hours’ provider for teachers,” Devon shares. Clock hours are professional development hours that public school teachers complete in order to advance their careers, increase their salaries, and expand their credentials. Teachers usually pay out-of-pocket for these trainings, which may also have limited local availability. Working in collaboration with school districts, we’re planning to design and implement professional development trainings for teachers that are specifically relevant to this region to help them complete their clock hours.
“This programming will be offered free of charge for local educators, which is vitally important,” Devon explains.
This summer, we’re partnering with the Jefferson County Library to support their Level Up youth summer education program in Port Hadlock/Chimacum and Quilcene.
A Land Trust education volunteer with students at Duckabush Oxbow and Wetlands Preserve in Brinnon.
We’re also always looking for more education volunteers — and are grateful for those who join the Land Trust to make all our youth education work possible. We work with a multitude of amazing Land Trust volunteers from the community to run our youth education field trips, classroom visits, teacher support, and more.
“Huge thanks goes out to our education volunteers. Without them, these programs wouldn’t be possible. They show up time and time again to assist with our education programming in the field and in the classroom,” Devon says. (Interested in volunteering? Contact Devon at dbuckham[at]saveland.org.)
We’re very much looking forward to next year, with several field trips already planned for fall 2025 and a teacher training planned for early September. In the meantime, we hope all the students and families in Jefferson County enjoy getting outside this summer to continue learning from the land!
