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Co-Founder Rob Sandelin
"My primary goal as an educator at the Environmental Science School is to create connections between students and nature. I do this because I believe once students have a deep connection to nature, they become advocates, often for the rest of their life. We have lots of time and experiences with nature as part of our program.
An example. We spent several trips a few years ago along a certain creek watching, counting and learning about salmon. We watched a female dig a redd (her nest) and the whole cycle. Every time we went back the kids looked for red girl, as they had named her. During one rainy day the kids noticed a pipe dumping gunky water into OUR stream onto OUR fish. They were outraged. We followed the pipe back and discovered it was a street drain, full of crud and oil from cars off the road. I did not tell them how to feel or act, they did that on their own, based on their connection to that place. After school they ALL met and cleaned up that whole street, then, unknown to me, a bunch of them went to an evening political debate between a couple of candidates for mayor. They stood up in a room full of adults, and demanded to know what the candidates were going to do about the street drains in our town which dump oil and gunk onto OUR salmon stream. They were articulate, bright and passionate advocates. As far as I am concerned, this is why I teach."
– Rob Sandelin, Naturalist, Writer, Teacher, Snohomish, Washington
Our Beginnings
Our Beginnings
In the year 2000, my former husband Rob Sandelin and I took our girls on a three-month road trip around the United States. The girls were SVEC students at the time and we homeschooled on the road and sent weekly updates to our cooperating teacher back at the school. On that trip, we decided that the school needed a hands-on, field-based environmental studies program. In the fall of 2000, I met retired Monroe teacher Sam Lockwood while completing native plant stewardship training with Snohomish County. In conversation with Sam, the idea of ESS was born and we discussed it with former SVEC director Bill Hainer. Bill convinced Sam to come out of retirement and in the spring of 2001 we started a one-day field program for middle to high school level students. Our goal was to bring a group of teachers from different disciplines together to integrate environmental studies, natural history, nature awareness, science, and indigenous people’s perspectives into everything we learned about. The following year we grew to two days a week, to include a classroom component to our program.
Soon after, we recruited Deb Schuldt, science department chair at Monroe High school, to come to SVEC. She stayed at SVEC until her retirement and with her help, we added a rigorous high school science program focusing on water quality, ecology, animal science, soils, and climate studies. Rob and I continued to mentor the students in their study of natural history, including plants, birds, mammals, insects, and ecological systems. In 2006, I completed my Master’s in Teaching with endorsements in English and Social Studies and soon moved into the role of Environmental Humanities instructor. By then, we had a three-day-a-week program, with Tuesdays as our field day.
Our goal was to be interdisciplinary, so that in their study of nature, students would understand the scientific underpinnings, cultural history, and indigenous ways of thinking, and explore creative ways to show learning through writing, the arts, and oral/digital communication. Also, being grounded in place, the Skykomish watershed, was to be at the heart of our field-based studies. We believed that through place-based education, our students would learn to love and appreciate our world, and be more likely to advocate for sustainable stewardship.
By Heidi Engle
Heidi Engle, Co-Founder
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