The first year went well. By the second year, the school was
full. By the third, IslandWood had a waiting list. Now demand
is so great IslandWood has to turn schools away. An expansion
project to accommodate 40 more children each session is in the
works.
Graduate students enrolled in a 10-month residency make up the
teaching staff. They live in dorm-like lodges in a corner of the
property and tap into the expertise of the permanent faculty, many
of whom have doctorates in education and environmental studies. On
alternate weeks, each graduate student is assigned a group of no
more than 10 children.
On the weeks they're not leading a class, the students spend
their time studying and taking courses to prepare them to be
schoolteachers or to work in some other area of environmental
education. The week before our visit, Katie Frickland studied ways
of relating the needs of individual students with the needs of the
group. "This week I can put what I learned into practice," she
says. "I can see immediately if what I'm trying works."
To prepare the children for their week, an IslandWood liaison
meets with the visiting classes at the beginning of the year to
help the local teachers align their curricula with what they will
encounter on the island. When the children go home, IslandWood
helps the classes develop community projects using what they've
learned at the school in the woods. Some children start recycling
programs. And others are replacing invasive weeds in their
neighborhoods with native plant species.
Homework
IT'S NOT JUST the children who will apply what they learned at
IslandWood. Now that the school is successful and has two new board
chairs, Brainerd is stepping away.
She'll be taking what she learned about planning, creating,
and fundraising to the Bloedel Reserve, a wildlife sanctuary
on Bainbridge, just a few miles away. She was invited to chair a
community board there to find ways to make the reserve more
self-sufficient.
But her heart will stay with IslandWood, where she found a way
to populate the wilderness with minimal disturbance to the
environment. "There's something magical about being in the woods,"
she says. "We have all these built, contained, man-made natural
worlds like aquariums and zoos. But that's not enough. The kids
that are here have their eyes opened in a way that they'll never be
opened in a built world."
Toward the end of their third day in the woods, the Pond group
comes across a charred tree trunk alongside the trail. They swarm
around it, reaching inside it to blacken their fingers. Their
leader, Kaitie, uses her fingertip to draw a black line on
each of her cheeks. The children follow suit. Some paint on
moustaches, goatees, and thick black eyebrows. A few just smear the
soot on their faces.
A mere three days ago these children were new to these woods. A
few of them were afraid to try new things, including walking in the
woods at night and eating pie made from a real pumpkin, not
out of a can. They had never touched a slug or pulled apart a wild
mushroom. Now, after walking nearly every acre of IslandWood,
they're as much a part this place as the wildlife.
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