Bud Darwin (3.16.23)

Bud Darwin is the Education and Volunteer Director for Sequoia Riverlands Trust. Below are my notes from a conversation with him on March 16, 2023.

SRT operates seven preserves in Tulare County, including one that contains vernal pools, the Kaweah Oaks preserve (about 8 miles outside of Visalia) and the Dry Creek preserve (which we will hopefully be visiting). They operate field trips for 3rd through 5th graders at these preserves.

Porterville Unified School District has an Environmental Science Academy, which is a model academy for the National Academies Foundation. The Porterville district has 14 different academies ("pathways") covering a broad range of different careers and topics. Within the ESA, SRT has established the "Earth Academy," which is a year-round program with 8 modules. Students apply and interview because they want to prepare them for future careers. It's a 2 period class block where each week they have a field trip that implements what they've learned.

Earth Academy has 8 modules. The first module is about group behavior, second is about human behavior and impact, other modules focus on soils and soil health, animal grazing, vegetation monitoring, watershed and conservation, restoration of impacted areas, citizen science (with iNaturalist), sustainable farming practices, and art projects. They have a lot of different tools/technologies that students learn to use and then demonstrate at community events. The program is fairly expensive--there's lots of equipment, including chillers for tanks where they raise trout (which they later release into streams). The program was funded in its first year by the federal EPA. The second year, they didn't have funding but they did have support from district administration (and land trust admin?), so they ran it in the red. Then they got EPA funding again and stretched it further because of COVID. This year, they're running without funding again, but EPA recently reached out and said there may be some money this spring.

They recently got fundingn from Prop 64 for a youth advisory council. It's a three year grant, they had students apply and do interviews like Earth Academy. They took them on field trips to all of the preserves, saw lots of different environments. Then asked: What's important to you? What do 3rd and 4th grade students need to know about these subjects? Then they get to design 30 minute stations for younger students. They're mostly recruiting high school students from Porterville and then targeting elementary schools in the surrounding areas that are highly disadvantaged feeders for Porterville. Many of these schools are in rural areas that are very underresourced, kids that have grown up in the foothills of the Sierras have never actually been up into the mountains. Small districts have really restrictive extracurricular budgets. They're working closely with the Academy for Careers in Education to recruit for this council.

One of the big challenges is that many of the elementary school districts don't have their own bus systems. They have to coordinate getting high school students out of class, getting them to the preserve, and getting the elementary school students to the preserve.

One of the things that has made this program possible is that the land trust's board is very supportive of educational efforts. This isn't the case at many other land tursts.

Other programs operating in the area: Sequoia Environmental Education Directive (rangers from the National Parks, Army Corps of Engineers do outreach in classrooms), County Office of Education sends every 6th grader in the county to a science and conservation camp for a week every summer and has recently expanded to sending 5th graders for a day, existing partnerships with CSU Long Beach and UC Merced.

Farmersville and Exeter have some of the highest per capita incomes in the country.