“Raise your hand if you’ve ever been to Crater Lake.”
The school bus was packed with Roseburg-area fifth graders for the short drive to this natural wonder, but only a few hands went up.
“Crater lake is the gem of Oregon, and we live so close to it, but the majority of the students had never been there,” says Katrina Keleher, Environmental Education Coordinator and AmeriCorps
Member for Umpqua Watersheds, which organized the adventure. The Roseburg-based nonprofit has been on the front lines of protecting forests and waterways in the Umpqua River Basin for two decades. The group also educates the public—including youth—about the wild beauty in their backyard.
“Just exposing these students to their natural landscape is one step toward making sure they understand and start loving where they live,” Keleher says.
In 2014, Umpqua Watersheds received a grant from the Gray Family Foundation to lead 90 fifth graders on a tour the whole basin—from Crater Lake to Sea—during three field trips. It began with the trip to Crater Lake in October 2014. Despite cold, rainy weather that day, the students were delighted.
“I was pretty amazed at their level of excitement. I heard a lot of kids saying, ‘oh my gosh, I want to bring my family or my sister back here,’” Keleher says.
In February 2015 students visited the Roseburg Urban Sanitary Authority to learn about their wastewater and where it goes. Then in the Spring they traveled to the South Slough Natural Estuarine Reserve in Charleston. Here the students spent the day hiking the estuary, collecting sea shells, identifying plants and newts, and looking at plankton under a microscope.
Paying for transportation is a huge challenge for cash-strapped Douglas County schools, and so the grant provided for buses to take the students to and from the sites. After a successful pilot year, Umpqua Watersheds plans to duplicate the program in the future.
“We’re so deeply thankful to the Gray Family for giving these students an opportunity to experience places that they maybe would have never been able to.”
