Welcome back to a new school year!
By Education Program Manager James Davis
Welcome back students, teachers and nature-loving families! I hope you had an enjoyable and restful summer and are feeling ready for the start of another year. I’ve been spending the summer working on funding applications and planning for the 2017/18 school year, but I also managed to take some time off and went on an amazing cycling trip down the Oregon coast and back up the Willamette Valley and then watched the solar eclipse from my friend’s front porch in Portland!
Looking back on the first eight months of my job here at Sierra Club BC, I’m proud of what the Education Program has accomplished. Our Environmental Educators, Kirsten and Amira, delivered over 200 workshop during the 2016/17 school year to nearly 5000 students at 74 different schools in 18 school districts across the province! We also facilitated six professional development workshops for teachers and created a brand new Climate & Place workshop for grade 6-8 students.
Looking ahead to the new school year, we are excited to continue to offer our favourite set of workshops that were so well received last year. We are also hoping to bring our programming to parts of the province where we haven’t been recently or ever before. If you know of a teacher or school in the northern part of Vancouver Island (including School Districts 70, 71, 72 and 85) that would be interested in free environmental education workshops, please pass on this newsletter to them! We’re also hoping to visit Kamloops, Merrit, Abbotsford and Chilliwack, so let your teacher friends know!
I am so grateful to be able to work at an such an amazing organization as Sierra Club BC and I can’t wait to see what the coming months bring. All the best for a wonderful school year, filled with lots of outdoor learning!
We rely on donations to keep our programs free, accessible, and inclusive year after year. Please donate today to ensure they can stay this way.
James Davis is the Education Program Manager at Sierra Club BC.
