Spreading our wings: Bird School Project’s plan for expanding outdoor education

The Bird School Project (BSP) was founded in 2014 by two UC Santa Cruz
Environmental Studies alumni who saw a need to inspire and equip both students and teachers to love, study, and steward their local environment, particularly among youth in urban areas.

Bird School student demonstrating the balance between recording in her journal and observing through binoculars

(The Bird School Project)

Inspired by the ubiquitous nature of birds, BSP engages students by visiting schools and taking students right outside on their school campus to discover the local avifauna first hand.

The Bird School Project’s main program, a four-visit life science unit, includes schoolyard birding with binoculars, close examination of museum specimens, and the use of a field journal in which students transform their observations outside into creative data that marks their own progress in understanding.

Research clearly indicates that time spent connecting with nature significantly improves people’s mental and emotional well-being, which is seriously at risk for many young people today.

Our highly successful core program costs less than $6 per student, but connects them to the natural resources right in their own communities, allowing them to immediately and continuously apply the skills taught.

A young hawk on a fence. A frequent spotting in schoolyards through the Monterey Bay region.

(The Bird School Project)

10,000 Students in 2022

Over the past five years, BSP has designed a collaborative professional learning program for traditional classroom teachers to gain comfort and become passionate about instructing science outside.

As the pandemic began and schoolyards closed, BSP stepped up to support teachers with live virtual presentations and provided outdoor, nature-based activities for small cohorts of students who needed to be on campus to access their online classes.

Now, with help from undergraduate interns from UCSC’s Ken Norris Center for Natural History and CSU Monterey Bay’s service learning program, our multi-visit schoolyard program will relaunch to reach over 10,000 students, grades 5-10, in the 2021-22 school year.

With your support we can greatly multiply our impact by investing in the following:

1. Increasing Leadership Team Capacity
2. Ensuring Affordable Access to our Core Schoolyard Program
3. Empowering Youth through Field Internships
4. Expanding Professional Learning & Teacher Collaboration

A group of teachers on a hike in Big Sur during a professional learning weekend

(The Bird School Project)

1. Increasing Leadership Team Capacity

BSP’s core leadership team currently consists of one full-time and two part-time positions.

Expanding our team’s capacity to three full-time positions would allow us to better train instructional staff, supervise more interns, participate in and host more community events, nurture relationships with the families of our students, and multiply our impact through new partnerships with other environmental education organizations.

Students take turns lining up the spotting scope for one another

(The Bird School Project)

2. Ensuring Affordable Access to our Core Schoolyard Program

Each year we rely on the contributions of foundations and hundreds of individual supporters to further supplement program fees for schools, ensuring equitable access to our core schoolyard program.

By supplementing program fees with donations and grants we are able to offer full scholarships and discounts to classrooms that face financial limitations, while providing livable wages and training for a diverse team of instructors and undergraduate student interns.

Students relax outside while they take note of the feathered friends that surround them

(The Bird School Project)

3. Empowering Youth through Field Internships

Our field internship program creates a secondary pathway to nature for high school students in Santa Cruz County. This paid internship supports four to five students per year to immerse themselves in nature, develop field science skills, and envision themselves as environmental stewards.

Two teachers practice making observations in the schoolyard during a professional learning session

(The Bird School Project)

4. Expanding Professional Learning & Teacher Collaboration

Supporting ongoing collaboration with teachers to integrate science learning with outdoor education and environmental literacy is paramount to amplifying our impact.

Our leadership team will be available to work with more teachers on nature-based lesson sequences and activities for students, as well as support more experiences exploring nature with teachers.