Recently ESD 113 received a $100,000 Goals 2000 grant on behalf of school districts in the Chehalis River Basin. The Chehalis Basin Education Partnership will be comprised of over 20 school districts, several natural resource agencies, institutions of higher education, and nonprofit agencies within ESD 113 in southwest Washington.
The primary goal of the project is to improve student learning in the region by linking Washington's essential academic learning requirements, skill standards, and assessment tasks to environmental issues that are part of this large watershed.
The overall approach to this project will be to engage school teams from the region to provide training on: the design of integrated units of study, the development of performance-based assessment tasks, the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the characteristics of the Chehalis River. These trainings will, in turn, allow teachers to become architects of curriculum that meets the needs of their schools and communities.
Teachers will be convened in one two-day workshop and two follow-up one-day sessions. Facilitators will be recruited from the Model Links project, another environmental education consortium that has been operating during the past several years.
The work of this consortium will be shared throughout the region and the state via the internet, conferences, presentations, newsletters, and other means.
A recent study by the Council of Chief State School Officers found that environmental education enhanced student interest in learning, strengthened critical thinking skills, and improved student performance. Washington State requires that "instruction about conservation, natural resources, and the environment shall be provided at all grade levels in interdisciplinary manner through science, the social studies, the humanities, and other appropriate areas with an emphasis on solving the problems of human adaptation to the environment" (WAC 180-50-115).
In 1998, the Onalaska School District received a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a series of teacher training workshops concerning environmental education. The grant provided hands-on experiences for teachers and for networking among participants through e-mail and bulletin boards. That grant provided a glimpse of the potential for the future development of a total basin-wide education program.
Thus, the vision for an education consortium involving school districts throughout the entire watershed was born.
A number of educational and resource agency partners have been, and will continue to be, actively involved in the design of the proposed activities of this educational consortium. The education agencies include ESD 113, Onalaska School District, Adna School District, Ocosta School District, and teachers from as many as 19 other districts, Grays Harbor College, and St. Martin's College.
The resource agency partners include the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and the Department of Ecology. The Chehalis River Council, a citizens' group that has formed a (501)(c)(3) organization, has joined this consortium as well. For a number of years, the council has provided the basin with information through a website and a monthly publication. Citizens on the council have raised issues concerning the health of the watershed, and have formulated "essential questions" that will serve as a basis for the development of hands-on curriculum and performance-based assessment tasks.
School districts and related attendance areas have very different needs.
This consortium is concerned that teachers, parents, staff, and citizens of each school community determine locally those curricular emphases, units of study, and performance tasks that are most important to be taught. It is an important aspect of this proposal to support school district teams in their efforts to improve teaching and learning based on the needs they have determined through their planning process. Over 90 percent of the resources of this grant will be deployed for direct use by teacher/employee/parent teams representing school buildings in the consortium. These teams will receive staff development and other assistance to improve the basic skills of reading, writing, communication, science, and mathematics, using the Chehalis River Basin as the context.
These teams will have complete flexibility as they determine their focus, design their curricula and lesson plans, and construct the performance tasks.
The previous article came from ESD 113's Communicating School News & Staff Development newsletter.
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