November 2007

KIDS for the BAY : 15 Year Celebration
Executive Director’s Speech

Thank you so much for coming to our Fifteen Year Celebration! We are really excited to share this evening with you and I really want to thank each of you for your support of our work over all these years.

As many of you know, KIDS for the BAY carries out most of our work in low-income, urban schools throughout Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. I want to ask you to think for a moment about a typical, low-income, urban school environment. Concrete and chain link fences surround the school building. There are even bars on the classroom windows. Factories, refineries and diesel fumes pollute the air and traffic and industry add noise pollution. There is no green, open space of any kind.

Now imagine a corner of that schoolyard transformed into a natural garden. It is a small urban wilderness with trees, native plants and wildflowers attracting butterflies and hummingbirds. There is a blue, still water pond and you can even hear frogs singing. Birds are visiting feeding areas and birdbaths. There is an edible garden for harvesting fruit and vegetables. This is a beautiful, colorful place of nature and peace. It was created by the children at the school. It is their special place to escape to. It is their living laboratory for studying hands-on, natural science. This is our new, KIDS for the BAY program – the Urban Wilderness Classroom. We are launching this new program this school year and your continued support will help us to make this possible. Our vision is to create a model, school wide program that can be replicated at multiple school sites to give every child access to nature.

Now that I have introduced our new program to you, I want to take a moment to talk about the past 15 years.

I started KIDS for the BAY in October 1992 because of the need that I saw to bring hands-on science and meaningful environmental education into our schools. Having been a teacher myself I also had a real idea of the type of in-depth support that teachers need to help them try something new.

At KIDS for the BAY we turn children onto science.

Students love doing hands-on science experiments. KIDS for the BAY students get to compare the density of fresh water and saltwater and discover how these types of water mix in an estuary.

Our students love getting out of the classroom and into the outdoors. On KIDS for the BAY field trips they get to hold a crab, touch a seasquirt, find a mayfly nymph hiding under a rock. They get to observe closely, ask and answer questions about anatomy and physiology and adaptations for survival and they carefully return everything back to its place in nature – this is real, hands-on science!

Why is this so important? There is so little science taught in elementary schools here in California and our science test scores are among the lowest in the nation.

As we all know, more environmental consciousness, more opportunities to take positive environmental action, are very needed in our society. At KIDS for the BAY, we empower children to take environmental action.

KIDS for the BAY students get to select, plan and implement their own action projects. This gives them ownership and provides the opportunity for them to become leaders in their community.

Teachers love KIDS for the BAY because we come into their classrooms and take them and their students on field trips. Teachers get to learn alongside their students as we model all the activities for them so that they really see how to do hands-on activities with a class of 30 excited fourth grade students. We also provide our curriculum guide and an equipment kit, a year of follow up support and the opportunity to receive professional level academic credit so that teachers can continue teaching our programs themselves. This is how we create the lasting impact of our work.

Turning children on to science, inspiring environmental action and creating a lasting impact – these are the three things that make KIDS for the BAY programs successful.

Since 1992, KIDS for the BAY has delivered programs to 40,000 elementary school students and 1,700 teachers.

Over the past few years, we have received two national environmental awards – in 2005 we received an Environmental Achievement Award from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and last week we received the Coastal Living Education Award.

KIDS for the BAY students have:

• completed over 1,000 creek, bay and neighborhood clean-up projects
• planted over 5,000 riparian plants along local creeks
• created and delivered over 1,000 presentations to families and peer students to encourage them to reduce urban runoff pollution to the bay
• raised and released over 4,000 Pacific Chorus Frogs
• written more than 1,000 letters and interviewed politicians to express concerns about watershed pollution.

When I started KIDS for the BAY, it was a one-woman operation. Over the past fifteen years I have been so lucky to work with and have the support of some really wonderful people. Many of you are here tonight and I am counting on all of you to help make the next fifteen years another great success!