To Ditch the Screen, Los Angeles Schoolchildren Escape to the Great Outdoors for In-Person Science

It’s a program that relied on donations to be realized. Salazar would like to see it grow but knows the funding realities might not allow this long term. “We are mindful that ongoing costs may not have the future funding, post CARES Act, necessary to operate.”

While the one-time cost of the vans was covered by philanthropists, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the district has to cover the staffing and gas costs. “The current fleet of four may be sufficient when considering the entirety of outdoor and environmental education programs offered,” Salazar said.

This salamander lesson at Baldwin Hills’ Jim Gilliam Park is the second time the Eco Van has come to work with this group of children, all made possible due to LAUSD’s partnership with the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks where students come daily to utilize the Wi-Fi and child care.

The children look eagerly at one outdoor educator, who they call Ms. Willow, as she peppers them with questions. “What is a salamander? Has anybody ever seen a salamander?” There are some guesses, some giggles and then a first grader responds correctly. “It is definitely a lizard.”

This little boy is wiggling about, raking his fingers back and forth through the grass around him.

He is eager to open his ziplock and get to work. “I’m going to build a house that protects the salamander from the wind,” he said.

Storey said they tweaked the usual lessons they would give the kids to reflect that in the mountains, they’d really encounter animals. “Salamanders are small,” she said. “They are important to the ecosystem.” For the park lesson, children get a paper salamander. Step one? Color it in. It’s a task the children gleefully attack.

Being outdoors to learn is more than just nice, said Salazar. “I’ve always felt that the outdoors is a bit of a human equalizer.” Nature “provides opportunities for children to be able to lower their anxiety, to lower their stress levels,” Salazar said.

He predicts other long-term benefits as well. “They may look to these open spaces like these neighborhood parks to seek out their own wellness and it [may] empower them to be responsible for their own general health.”

The learning benefits are tangible, said Ashley Storey. “First graders are jumping ahead as they are grasping onto concepts that probably wouldn’t even come to them until later grades [like] third, fourth grade.”

This stands in contrast to data analyzed late last year by McKinsey & Company that found by the end of the fall, students had only learned 67% of the math compared to same-age peers the previous fall. That equated to about three months of learning loss, according to researchers. For schools with predominantly children of color, that math level fell to 59% of what was learned in the same period the year before. There was a learning loss in reading ability of up to two months.

Learning about ecosystems is clearly more engaging when taught as an engineering project. The tactile nature of all these lessons makes learning, especially for very young children, a much more meaningful experience.

Other lessons contained in large plastic tubs in the back of the Eco Van include a “skull lab.” Storey said, “Students get a replica skull of different animals and they have to try to figure out which animal the skull belonged to” by measuring it, looking at the kind of teeth it has, and asking questions to narrow down an answer.

In all the activities the outdoor educators do with students, Salazar said many STEM standards are checked off, and the same activity can be made more sophisticated for higher grades, or simplified for kindergarteners.

The goal, Salazar said, is to provide an “introduction to learning about their environment and how they influence that environment and how they are influenced by it as well.”

That’s a goal that used to be met when students came up to Camp Skyhook and spent days learning outside. But during this year-plus of distance learning, that hasn’t been possible, so the Eco Vans have filled in some of that gap. And they will continue to operate for the rest of this school year, pulling up to parks and school campuses where children are learning.

Beyond this school year, however, like much of the education world, Salazar doesn’t know what the future holds.

For now, at least, this handful of children is learning in the great outdoors. When their Zoom school day finished and the Eco Van arrived, the kids started with the building blocks of their lessons: cardboard, duct tape, plasticine, pipe cleaners and toilet rolls. But in this bucolic outdoor classroom in the park, students have mixed those materials into a diorama of a forest, with duct tape as the busy road the salamander has to cross. The perfect salamander crossing.

These children-built ecosystem models allowed paper salamanders to cross the road, safely, under a real beaming sun, surrounded by the little smiling student engineers. Mission accomplished for Storey and her team.