[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:16] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guests today are Kerry Kirk Pflugh, Executive Director of the New Jersey School of Conservation (SOC), Tanya Sulikowski, SOC D irector of Education, and K.C. Bree, middle school science teacher in Garwood, New Jersey Public Schools. Welcome, Kerry, Tanya, and K.C.
[00:00:32] Jon M: Kerry, tell us about the New Jersey School of Conservation.
[00:00:36] Kerry P: So the New Jersey School of Conservation actually has a very rich and very long history. We are technically celebrating our 75th anniversary this year, but in fact, the New Jersey School of Conservation goes back to the Civilian Conservation Corps when young men, as part of Roosevelt’s team, built the facility and lived at the facility during the years that they were doing conservation work in New Jersey, specifically in Sussex County.
After they left, a gentleman by the name of Dr. L. B. Sharp felt that the facility could become an outdoor center for the residents and students and teachers and researchers of New Jersey. And so he approached the governor at the time, Governor Driscoll, and with the help of Senator Alfred Littell and a group of educators, they convinced the governor and the state legislature to form the New Jersey School of Conservation.
And so we officially came into existence in 1949, on Memorial weekend of 1949, and invited our first students, college students, to attend the school. In those early days, the focus of the work at the School of Conservation was to bring young people who were studying to be teachers to the School of Conservation for a one-week experience to teach them how to take their lessons that they would be in the classroom and apply them in a natural setting. The philosophy at the time was that which can be learned in the outdoors should be. And our approach, which continues to this day, is education through experience, experiential learning, hands-on, very interactive approaches. So that young people can reinforce and remember some of the lessons that they are being taught by the educators. So, that’s a very quick background over the years.
We’ve evolved from just being a teacher-focused organization to servicing the elementary students who, during the sixth grade school year, are experiencing their environmental education training. We have a model that, up until just recently was the students would come for a three-day, two-night experience, and we would take the lessons in all of the major curriculum areas and teach them in the field — applied science, math, humanities, arts — and apply them in a natural setting. We also, I should say, continue doing professional development and we also have an agreement with Rutgers University to offer opportunities for field research at the School of Conservation and in Stokes Forest.
[00:03:22] Amy H-L: Could you tell us a bit about the PD program?
[00:03:25] Kerry P: I’m going to let Tanya take this. Tanya?
[00:03:27] Tanya S: Sure. So our teacher professional development program at the School of Conservation is designed for teachers to get field-based experience. And that goes back to our early roots in teacher professional development and is still very relevant in 2024. It seems to be that many teachers who are graduating from college-level programs haven’t had the opportunity to do fieldwork and understand where data comes from and how they can connect that to what they’re doing in their classroom with their students. Most of our teacher workshops have a format where the teachers come up and they stay in our cabins on campus and we get them out in canoes and on the climbing wall and working with university-level scientists who are collecting data on our property. We help them understand where the science comes from and then work with them to understand how they can translate that into the work that they’re doing with their students. And as Kerry mentioned, all of our curriculum is cross-disciplinary. So even if teachers are coming to the SOC to learn about climate change, for example, we can do that through the lens of humanities and the arts and physical education and science. And so that cross-disciplinary model is the thing that we use to hook teachers and get them to come back because there’s always something new to learn at the school.
[00:04:47] Jon M: K.C., New Jersey is the first state to mandate climate education for every grade. How are you teaching climate change to your middle school students?
[00:04:56] K.C. B: Well, luckily, in Garwood, we did have a pretty strong emphasis on climate change, and in particular, a whole section that we study about the human impacts on the environment. So we were fortunate to have a framework in place. However, it was definitely my understanding that most of our peers, most of my peer teachers teaching middle school sciences, did not have this. So when New Jersey implemented, relatively suddenly, this new requirement, it left a lot of us needing to develop our own PD to pass that on to our students.
I did apply for a grant that the state had offered, which was awarded to school districts that needed to implement this sudden chapter of education in climate change, in particular. And the very first person I reached out to, thankfully, was the New Jersey School of Conservation. I said, help, and they were fantastic. They had so much in place already. We had familiarity with their school and their program from having gone there in many years past. But I needed them to customize for me to help bring that climate change-specific curriculum to my students. So this past year, we were able to begin again coming up to the school to do our normal program of outdoor environmental education but with a particular emphasis, thankfully, so much to Tanya and her staff, on climate change and the effects that it would have there.
Both Kerry and Tanya emphasized the idea of cross-curricular, which was emphasized when I brought my students up. They were able to apply math skills in terms of taking direct temperatures. It’s a concept called albedo with what materials retain more heat. So they were using math skills. They were using chemistry skills in terms of material composition. They were talking about energy, specifically in terms of electromagnetic or radiation, what sun was affecting what surfaces. So it went cross-curricular. There’s also a huge push in the school systems right now to do what they call SEL, social-emotional learning. And that was always, one of the big reasons why we did go to the School of Conservation was for that component. So this time we were able to cross-train. At the same time, giving confidence to the students, confidence course, working in team, team building, coming up as a group to devise solutions to potential problems, et cetera. So besides learning, yes, the climate change that was mandated by the state, Stokes was able to provide us so much more.
And they were able to support me. I am a one-man band, and by being able to rely on the quality staff, I mean, suddenly I had 13 people training my students and working with them and teaching them exactly the sciences and the environment and social, emotional learning and math. And you get the idea. So they’re just a fantastic program.
But that’s how we responded, in answer to your question, Jon, that is how we responded. I was fortunate enough to have a base already. I was fortunate enough to know where to go to seek assistance. And I was super fortunate to have Tanya and the team at the School of Conservation there to support me. They were amazing. We turned out okay.
[00:08:16] Kerry P: And K.C., our joke at the School of Conservation is that we’ve been doing social-emotional learning since 1949 for all the reasons that you just described. It’s kind of a new buzz term in education, but the programs that we’ve offered have been meeting the needs of students and faculty like yours for many, many years.
[00:08:34] Tanya S: Exactly. Exactly. That’s why we were there for over 50 years. The schools aren’t equipped. And it’s now this new push according to education, but it’s not new at all. The SOC had this, [inaudible] years.
[00:08:46] Kerry P: One of the things I wanted to just add that I don’t believe we mentioned is that all of the lessons that we offer the education community have been correlated to the core curriculum standards for the state, including our climate change lessons, so that when teachers select the program for their school and for their students, they can rest assured that they’re meeting the requirements that are necessary for their students and for them to teach their students.
[00:09:18] K.C. B: And there’s also a follow-through. Part of the programming that SOC has always [inaudible] Garwood, a small school, that Garwood appreciates, is not just that your experience ends after your three days there, but they have pushed the idea of what can you take home? How can your experience here have a positive effect moving forward? What actions did we learn about, you are going to take back with you, come back to your home, implement this new education, behavioral change, or attitudinal change? And that’s always been an emphasis and continues to be from my experience.
[00:09:55] Amy H-L: So it sounds like you’re teaching not just content, but also an ethics of care, perhaps.
[00:10:03] Tanya S: Most definitely.
[00:10:04] Kerry P: Lovely way to put it. Yes.
[00:10:06] Tanya S: Yeah. And I think that’s also been a part of our mission since the founding of our school. And the way that we do that is just through exposure to the outdoors with our instructional staff who do a lot of research about where the communities are that the students are coming from so that we can provide a very place-based educational experience for them.
It’s important that we understand who our clients are and what some of their lived experiences have been before they come to us so that our instructors are prepared to customize the lessons for students from wherever they come from. And so through doing that, we’re able to create an environment where the students feel safe and they feel excited to learn and they feel comfortable in their environment.
And after that, it’s pretty easy. We have a beautiful lake. We have amazing mountains. We have lots of wildlife that’s exciting. We have bald eagles flying over our lake all the time and salamanders under logs for the kids to find. And so when we’re thinking about social-emotional learning, the connections that the students make through us are the foundation that we hope they’ll build. And then, as K.C. was saying, take back to their communities and carry that ethic of care with them through the rest of their lives. Our approach with climate change education is the idea that we want students to first develop a love for the environment and a connection and a passion. And then based on that they will hopefully go back to their communities and take action and become better parents or vote differently or become lifelong learners based on what they have experienced with us.
[00:11:40] Jon M: K.C., I know your grades are six through eight. To what extent can you talk about how Garwood’s been able to or is looking forward to integrating climate change education in the earlier grades? Is this something that it’s already been doing a lot? Or is this new for some of your colleagues?
[00:11:59] K.C. B: Both. After we had our trip last year up to Stokes with the grant given by the state, part of the follow-up in my grant proposal was that as both social-emotional learning and climate change, students had to train, to come back and teach the younger grades what they learned. So it was done grade-appropriate, but we went back down to the younger students. We did energy audits inside the classroom. We used our infrared thermometers to explain what albedo was. We didn’t use that word. And so they were passing on to those younger kids. They had to do a presentation for each of the lower, I had seventh grade, so they did each of the lower sixth grades.
But more importantly, they also went in front of our board of education and in front of our governing body in town, again, the very small borough that is Garwood. And we convinced the green team, in terms of… They were remodeling a park. We have adopted this park. It’s a county park from the state, and they were putting in a new path through a walkway, and it was these students that took what they learned up at Stokes, brought it back, and were able to make recommendations. So, not just to their peers or to those below them, but actually to their government body, their parents, their neighbors, and their mayor. And were able to convince them with education why different materials were the best for their park. And they definitely consider it their park. So that was another thing that they learned up at Stokes was that this is theirs and it’s theirs to take care of or not, and the future will depend very much on them.
The other thing that was a huge positive that they came back was the idea, I think so often they get all of the dread and the horror and the destruction that we have done to the planet. But instead, Stokes emphasized for them through that educational process that we’re not too late, that there are lots of things that we can still do, and that we should do, and what a positive effect it will have.
And by my students coming back, they had a very positive effect right in their own neighborhood. They ultimately chose wood chips for the path through the park, but they were able to explain why. It was a natural substance, and it kept cooler than others, even out in the sun and because of the air. So they were able to take all of the science and integrate it all and then work together, which they learned again through that SEL, we’re going to call it, but through the confidence course work together. Who’s going to be the speaker? Who’s going to present the data? What strengths did they each bring to their teams as they went to the lower grades and kind of explained what was happening in town and why they were doing it?
So, long-winded answer. Sorry.
[00:14:36] Amy H-L: That was great. Could you speak a little bit about, you meaning anyone who wants to chime in, a little more about SEL in this context?
[00:14:45] Tanya S: So the idea of social-emotional learning is one that’s been discussed in the educational community for quite some time now. New Jersey has its own social-emotional learning competencies. They’re not required as part of any official curriculum, but they are encouraged to be taught in the classroom. Social-emotional learning has become particularly relevant and in the forefront of everyone’s mind post-pandemic because we all are aware of some of the social and emotional issues that our students are facing after all of the horrible things that we all went through as a result of the pandemic. And so that language has become part of our vernacular at the School of Conservation, even more now than it had been before because many schools approach us and they’re looking for what K.C. was describing, an opportunity for students to interact with each other in a different way, to learn to communicate, to learn to cooperate. We have some schools that… it’s interesting how kids have responded post-pandemic. Some groups come to us and the kids are still a little nervous about getting too close to each other physically. When we do these team-building challenges that we give other schools, sometimes have kids that are kind of craving that physical connection, particularly after the school reopened. And so every community has different issues that they are looking to address, but luckily we have an experienced staff who work well with kids from all different communities that have different needs.
And so we create an opportunity for the kids to find success through these challenges that they work through together. And then they take home a message from the social-emotional learning activities that we do with the kids. How are you going to take this back to your own community and apply this knowledge? Because oftentimes it seems like kind of a stretch when you’re doing team building activities. How do we relate that to environmental awareness and that care ethic? But our mantra with the kids is, the problems of the world are so complex that there’s not one kind of thinker or one person that can solve those problems alone. We need to work collaboratively to do that. And so the relevance of the activities that we do with the kids comes through when we present it through the context of solving these complex environmental problems, but it seems a little bit more manageable after the kids start to see the strengths that other students in their group have that they might not have seen before we, we presented these challenges to them.
So it’s an important part of our curriculum. It has been for a long time, but now post-COVID it’s more relevant than it ever was before. And it has a label. It has a label. Yes.
[00:17:22] K.C. B: And to add to that just a little is the idea also of confidence building. We saw in the classroom, yes, everything Tanya was saying, the students didn’t know how to interact with one another. They don’t know how to do group projects anymore because for so long we separated them. And they weren’t allowed to do that. And now all of a sudden we’re saying, okay, we’re back to normal. But they said, I never experienced normal. That this next generation, it’s not a matter of going back to what they had done. They didn’t, it’s challenging for them, for us, to now say, this is how you play together in the sandbox when they never had to, this is how to find out that you are not the only ship in the sea, like maybe we can make an armada if we go together. And to that same extent, we used to call it the confidence course. I don’t know if they still call it that at Stokes, but it is. But in fact, the idea of building their individual confidence was huge in terms of SEL for my students, that many students. learned that they that they had to at least try. And part of the social-emotional learning and ethics behind that was that everybody else is cheering you on. You had a support system, physically and emotionally while you’re walking the tightrope. But while you’re walking the tightrope in some cases, because that’s all somebody could maybe do, it took one of my students almost 20 minutes to go about 15 feet. And by the time you got to the end, I mean, the roaring cheering from the rest of the students, he learns the confidence. The rest of them learned that when they support one another, where can we go? It would have been impossible at the beginning for him to get all the way across that, but he did. So that social-emotional learning is It’s such a little term, believe it or not, for so much that they learn out in that environment and take back with them.
[00:19:19] Kerry P: Right. One of the things I think that has been true for the New Jersey School of Conservation from its founding is the idea of bringing people of all ages into a natural setting and conducting various types of activities. Nature is the great equalizer. It breaks down barriers. And roles that individuals might be playing without them even knowing that we’re playing them the cool kid, the nerdy kid, the quiet kid, the loud kid. Suddenly, everyone is the same because they’re in an environment that’s different than what they’re used to, and all sorts of personalities, all sorts of traits, all sorts of knowledge kind of emerges from the interactions that the kids have. And so what Tanya and K.C. are talking about – action, socialization, these are exercises to, to break down these barriers and to look at one another in a different way.
There are two things that are happening at the School of Conservation. We’re teaching science and all of our lessons in a natural setting, but we’re also learning about each other, how to get along, how to be welcoming to one another, how to put aside differences and see one another as being the same, and working together. So our goal is to help young people not only learn about the natural environment and climate change and sustainability, but also to learn about one another and to respect one another’s unique qualities, their differences and their similarities.
[00:20:58] Tanya S: I have one more quick thing to add. One of my favorite things about my job is debriefing with the school coordinators after the schools leave and asking them about their experience. And inevitably, every single time, the teacher will say to me I never knew this kid was like this. We give them the opportunity to shine. Some kids that just aren’t wired to sit still at a desk all day long. They come out to us and they’re in their glory. And so their peers and their teachers get to see a whole side of them that no one’s ever seen before. And we call that student the underdog. They are the kid who doesn’t always get all the accolades in school, but man, when you get them outside and you you get them in an environment like we have, they have an opportunity to shine in a way that they hadn’t before. So that’s one of my very favorite things about my job.
[00:21:45] K.C. B: Tanya, I don’t know if you remember specifically, I know you have lots of groups, but we had one student in particular when we came up. And for lack of better terms, we’re gonna call him the nudge. And the kids would be like, oh him again, oh no, whatever. But what they found during one of our activities was that time and time again, he was an out-of-the-box thinker. And when it came to being successful in certain activities that we were doing for the group, they weren’t listening to him. Everybody’s talking over him. And he’s like, but I’m telling you if, whatever, but everybody ignores. We’ll call him Dan. Everybody ignores Dan until finally our coordinator stopped and said, now wait a second. Let’s listen to everybody’s ideas because what makes for successful group communication and what have you. And so we’re going to listen to everyone’s ideas, including Dan’s at which point, boom! Time and time and time again, Dan came up with the solution. He became the hero. So he went from being the zero to the hero in like an hour. And by the time we got to the last activity, we heard what the problem was and everybody turned to Dan. It teaches that everybody has something to contribute that perhaps, perhaps to a surprising standpoint. You just never know. So taking that idea of relationships one step further.
[00:22:59] Amy H-L: How do you approach the kids’ relationships with animals, animals other than humans, and perhaps their responsibility toward them?
[00:23:11] Kerry P: We have a class it’s, it’s called wildlife skull stories and the class challenges the students to look at either real skulls that have been cleaned and processed or skull replicas. they learn a lot about animal adaptations to their environment and the kinds of things you can learn from looking at artifacts like this. And one of the things that we do is include a human skull in the assortment that the students are looking at. And oftentimes that’s when a light bulb goes off for kids because they don’t always see humans as a separate being. They see us as top of the food chain and don’t lump us in with the other organisms that live on the planet. So that’s an important message that we send through that lesson. But a lot of what we do with the kids is teachable moments out on the trail. If we’re not specifically focused on learning about wildlife and we’re walking along and we find a turtle or salamander or bird or something interesting, we take advantage of that teachable moment and, and stop and talk with the kids about why this organism is important and why it has value and what its role is in the ecosystem. And honestly, we don’t need to do a lot of talking because most of the time when we find fun wildlife it sells itself, but it creates a great opportunity for us to talk about the relationships that we have with other living things and with plants. Plants oftentimes get overlooked as part of natural systems because it they might not be as sexy as a black bear or salamander or some of the other things that the kids encounter. But finding fun plants on the trail is one of my favorite things to do with the kids and sharing with them the value as, you know, a medicinal plant or a food plant or something that fixes atmospheric nitrogen or whatever. So we try to send the message that the students are part of a system and we’re an important part of that system, but we’re not the only part of that system.
[00:25:09] Jon M: I wanted to go back for a minute to climate change education in a large sense. I mean, because obviously, as we were talking about New Jersey is the first state in the country to mandate it at every grade. And there was just an article, I think in the New York Times, the other day about how other states are starting to pick up on it as well. We’re also just at the beginning of intense climate change climate weirding, you know I’ve heard it referred to, and I’m just wondering if any of you have thoughts on what you think this could end up looking like, maybe not just in New Jersey, but five years from now ten years from now. Do you have any thoughts on how schools may be approaching climate in general? I know that’s taking a leap, but I’m curious what your thoughts might be.
[00:25:56] Kerry P: Climate change in general has become part of our daily lives. You turn on the news, they’re talking about climate change. When they talk about weather, the weather people now not only mention climate change but also make the distinction between weather and climate change. That’s something that I’ve noticed just in the last couple of years. I think that some of the products that we’re seeing on the market are being targeted and developed as a consequence of climate change. I know the farm community is engaging in various types of practices. And I heard just recently, here up where I live in the northern part of the state, that they’re beginning to talk about putting irrigation systems into their fields because we have very long periods of dryness in the growing season. That’s never happened before. It’s just in my lifetime. We’re seeing impacts on the recreational community. You know, up here in the northern part of the state, we used to have ski resorts. They’re still there, but the snow is not always a possibility, so they’ve had to adapt. What other kinds of activities can we offer in the wintertime in what’s now becoming a more normal winter without snow? In general, society, whether or not they are consciously aware, we’re slowly adapting. You look down in South Jersey, homes are being elevated. Some are being abandoned. Our rivering communities are trying to figure out how to adapt to water that’s rising above the banks and coming into our streets when that’s never happened before. And because our infrastructure, our drainage systems, everything is being studied and evaluated and evacuation routes are all being taken into consideration. So I think it’s permeated throughout our entire society.
How all of that is getting translated into how we educate young people, I think that’s evolving. The classroom teachers, as K.C. mentioned, are being challenged by this new awareness, this new reality that we need to face as a society. And how do we talk to young people in a hopeful way, giving them the tools to adapt instead of making them afraid?
So I think, Jon, what’s happening broadly is that we’re all learning and adapting and modifying the way we talk, the way we live, where we choose to live, how we recreate, so that we can still function in a positive and healthy way in our new and ever-changing environment. But as far as how classrooms are addressing it, K.C., I think you’re probably the best to address that.
And then Tanya, maybe you can talk about what we’re doing at SOC.
[00:28:44] K.C. B: It came as such a surprise, I have to be honest, last year when Governor Murphy implemented the climate change education requirements in the classroom. We should have seen it coming, but we didn’t. And again, fortunately, in my classroom, it has always been a passion of mine, and so I have taught my students and will continue to forever. But because it’s something that ‘s such a global and important thing to do, especially for it to be cooperative because we could do as much work as you want. But if your neighbor is not, he’s completely canceled out any efforts that you have made.
So it’s a community process to correct some of the human impacts that we are having on the environment. Moving forward, I would love to tell you that I see this as being perhaps yet another discipline separate from science, but in fact, an entire entity unto its own, but I don’t know because unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that there’s not a lot of glory and it’s expensive.
And that combination, depressingly, personally saddeningly, is not going to be pushed to the forefront. Instead, we’re going to be hearing, I think, more about engineering and mathematic races against other countries. And I think that monies are going to be thrown that way. There is not private sector money to be made in climate change long term and that saddens me. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m going to take the current wave that is riding and I’m going to keep shouting from the top of that wave as long as it brings me to shore.
[00:30:21] Tanya S: And I think from the School of Conservation’s perspective, New Jersey is on the cutting edge, right? We are the 1st state in the nation to integrate climate change education standards into our curriculum. And so all eyes are on us. As K.C. said, it was rolled out at a hard time when COVID was just starting to shut everything down. And so I think now we have a great opportunity to create a different model for education. We can take what we have learned at the School of Conservation over the last 75 years about what we know works with kids. Kids are different now than they used to be. I’m sure everybody’s been saying that for hundreds of years, so we just need to figure out… Everybody always says, ah, kids today. But that’s always been the way it is. And so on a hopeful note, I think that we have an opportunity to create a new model for education where we are helping kids understand these global problems that seem insurmountable, have solutions. And we are the think-outside-the-boxers. Like K.C.’s student, Dan, I think that those are the kinds of kids we need to cultivate through the programs that we have and help them build the confidence to feel like they can solve these problems.
And we just keep doing what we’ve been doing, but putting a hopeful spin on it and creating opportunities for kids to feel like they have a voice and can take action. And now there’s all this new stuff. There are these new forms of industry with green technology. And we have kids who are thinking creatively there.
Maybe there can be a strong economic force behind the changes that we all want to see happen. So we just need the right support from the right places for those changes to happen. But I think we have minds out there that can solve the problems.
[00:32:00] Kerry P: And to add to that the School of Conservation is here. Tanya said, Jersey is at the forefront of this in the education world. I think we’re at the forefront in many other sectors as well. The New Jersey School of Conservation is right here leading the charge, providing a space for teachers to get the tools they need to apply them in the classroom in innovative and creative ways. I think the School of Conservation is also a place where we can welcome residents and citizens and students from all over the state, regardless of what community they’re from, so that this is a safe space for them to learn, to feel comforted, and to feel that they can take action and solve problems in their own communities.
[00:32:44] Amy H-L: It must be very empowering to students who are suffering from climate anxiety. We hear so much about that.. Do you see yourself as a model for institutions across the country?
Absolutely. The School of Conservation has always been a model. Long before the four curriculum areas were being taught in field centers and outdoor education centers in our state or around the country, we were doing it at the school. We developed many of the methods of the experiential approach to learning that are being used in environmental centers in New Jersey and across the country and frankly across the world. Our educators, our faculty traveled all over the world spreading the information on how best to teach young people and educators in the field, how to apply the classroom lessons in a natural setting, and we’re continuing to do that 75 years later, I believe that we are amongst the leaders in this effort to educate not only young people but provide the tools to educators so that they have the wherewithal to work with their students on a daily basis all throughout the school year.
[00:33:57] Jon M: How do schools reach out to you if they want to participate?
[00:34:01] Kerry P: We have an environmental education coordinator, the wonderful Allyson Lance, we’ll give her a little shoutout in our podcast today. She is wearing many hats right now because after our COVID closure of the school, we’re reopening, so we’re not fully staffed. So Allyson is our program coordinator and environmental education coordinator. So if folks are interested in reaching out for a field trip opportunity, they can reach out to Allyson through the website and she will get right back to them and help them develop a custom program that meets the needs of their schools.
We also have a wonderful media expert who’s been working with us. And so we’ve been very fortunate over the last couple of years. We’ve been, at least every couple of months, in the press and the media about what’s happening at SOC. So people are learning about us through our media exposure, but I think one of the benefits that we had, and Amy, you were talking earlier about relationships. The School of Conservation has had relationships with schools throughout New Jersey, some for 50 years, some for 40 years. And so they were very eager to come back once they learned that we had reopened. We had a fairly extensive client list. As soon as we were able to welcome schools back to the campus, we reached out to all of our former clients. And one of the things that’s interesting, and Tanya alluded to this, how things have changed a little bit since the COVID closure. Many of the school groups are challenged in terms of being able to come and stay with us for the three-day, two-night experience. So we’ve had to include a one-day option and adjust our model for those schools that are looking for only one day, or can only afford to bring their students for one day, or who are still dealing with a lot of the anxiety as a consequence of being shut down and want to re-enter the idea of field trips slowly so their young people aren’t shocked, but in places that it might cause them some concern.
So we’re adapting to the new world, and we will continue to offer schools what they need along the lines of the four curriculum areas that we’ve discussed previously.
[00:36:22] Amy H-L: Thank you so much, Kerry Pflugh, Tanya Sulikowski, and K.C. Bree. This has been fascinating.
[00:36:30] Jon M: And thank you, listeners. Check out our new video series, What Would YOU Do?, a collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and EdEthics. Go to our website, ethicalschools. org, and click video. The goal of the series is not to provide right answers, but to illustrate a variety of ethical viewpoints.
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