The Watershed Staff of the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit was awarded the USDA-Forest Service Chief's Stewardship Award in 1990. This prestigious honor recognized the many innovative national forest and S & PF programs successfully implemented by this staff in response to the challenges of land stewardship in the sensitive environment of Lake Tahoe. With the award came another challenge, $50,000 to invest in a "Stewardship" project. This partnership is the result, and we believe it will make a lasting contribution to conservation education commensurate with the unique honor of the "Chief's Stewardship Award."
BACKGROUND
In March of 1991, Forest Service personnel met with officials of the Lake Tahoe Unified School District to discuss the potential for increasing environmental education in the public schools and for building a bond with the Forest Service in the community. Rather than spreading our interests too thin, we focussed on targeting sixth graders, an age group well recognized as highly receptive to developing lasting environmental values and making choices about future career interests. The discussions touched on an area of intense interest for Lake Tahoe Middle School Principal, Rich Alexander, and instantly created an atmosphere of mutual vision and purpose. In July of 1991, a Participating Agreement was signed between the LTUSD and the Forest Service-LTBMU to develop....
"a full year curriculum for sixth grade students that will emphasize the natural environment of the Tahoe Basin within the context of a watershed ecosystem and incorporate basic educational skills such as math, English, physical and biological sciences, and civic awareness as well as involve the students in natural resource management activities, disciplines, and potential career opportunities."
As part of the agreement, the Forest Service is working with sixth grade teachers to develop a curriculum outline, academic objectives, and a teaching guide with classroom and field activities. This will not be an "add-on" environmental studies program but rather a full-time integrated curriculum in which the students would spend their sixth-grade year learning about the entire spectrum of interests within a specific watershed: from history to land-use, geology to aquatic biology, wildlife to forests, meadows, etc. and man's interaction with each.
THE "LIVING WATERSHED PROJECT"
A major emphasis of the project is to take larger conceptual studies and translate them into local experience - through a "Living Watershed". The Lake Tahoe Middle School lies within the 26,000 acre watershed of Trout Creek. This watershed offers a wide array of examples for stream and terrestrial habitat types, geology and soils, land uses, as well as human history and environmental concerns. Its proximity to the school also provides opportunities for ready access to the students. By focussing case examples for classroom studies on the activities and resources in this watershed, students are able to make the concepts tangible and thus improve their retention. The watershed also provides a ready source of examples of resource management on National Forest lands.
The curriculum which is scheduled for final completion by July of 1992, follows a hierarchy of objectives:
THE FUTURE
This partnership has been an invigorating and productive experience for all of us to date. We look forward to the completion of the curriculum and its acceptance by the School Board. Already, sixth grade teachers are implementing and testing portions of it. We believe that having the programs developed by the teacher's themselves and implemented in a thematic education format will ensure its success. Forest Service employees from a variety of disciplines have volunteered to serve as liaisons with sixth grade teaching teams, thus providing a dimension of greater local resource knowledge and assistance in answering the tough questions posed by forest users.
Certainly, improved land ethics and future career choices can be outcomes of a program such as this. But today, these young adults are already influential members of the community and visitors to the National Forest. Along with their parents and friends, they represent the public we desire to serve in the next era of land stewardship.
