The resource challenge identified by the partners was twofold: people didn't understand forests or forestry, and many people in communities affected by the Green Mountain National Forest and the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park were not engaged in their communities--failing to run for local offices/boards or to even vote in large numbers.  When the partnership was formed we decided that building capacity in teachers, teaching them about forests, public land challenges, and encouraging them to become involved in their communities might start to reverse the issues we had identified.  We developed three goals:

1. To cultivate an understanding of "place"--teachers and their students experience and understand local forests as complex and dynamic systems of natural and cultural resources.  Interaction between the school and community increases, building a strong sense of place;
2. To enhance teacher practices--teachers have learning opportunities and time with curriculum specialists to help them address different learning styles and multiple intelligences.  They learn strategies for utilizing public lands as outdoor classrooms and integrating service learning into their existing curriculum; and
3. To develop citizenship skills and the fundamental tools of democracy--students gain knowledge, skills and motivation to be active stewards and citzens in their communities.

A Forest for Every Classroom recruits teachers--first from communities that are affected by the National Forest and National Park and then from all of Vermont.  Teachers agree to an 11-day program with a heavy load of work to be accomplished at home.  There are four workshops, one in each season so that seasonal forest changes can be discussed.  During the workshops, teachers spend 60 percent of their time in federal/state/community forests, learning about canopy, tree identification, bird and frog songs, forest floor composters, wildlife habitat, amphibians, and looking at cultural sites such as stone walls and cellar holes.  They learn about logging, milling, forest products and land use and land management challenges.  They also learn, from environmentalists, why they disagree with the way federal, state and local agencies manage public lands--even their own schoolyard, which is also public land.

Teachers must take what they are learning about forests--ecological or cultural--and create their own curriculum with the help of state experts in innovative curriculum development.  The curriculum must have a service learning component where teachers learn about the natural resource people/projects that are presently in their community and work with them to get the kids involved in a project the community needs accomplished.  What happens is the walls of the school come down with resource people going into the school to help the teachers with lessons and/or setting up a project in the community, and the kids coming out of the school to work with the community to accomplishment something.  The teachers receive grants for resources (books, equipment), service learning projects, and they also can apply for graduate credit for the program.

A Forest for Every Classroom is now in the fifth year.  There have been 45 teachers who have gone through the training and continue to meet every year for additional coursework, exchange of ideas, and strategy sessions about their continuing service learning projects.

Accomplishments are measured as those experienced by the partners and subsequently, those experienced by the teachers. 

Partners:  The partners have been successful in securing funding to run A Forest for Every Classroom for five years.  Not only have we secured top quality natural resource and educational personnel to teach the various workshops, we have also evaluated years 1, 2 and 4 of the program.  Those evaluations are at the following website: http://www.peecworks.org/PEEC/PEEC_Reports/S00043AB9-00043ABA and http://www.peecworks.org/PEEC/PEEC_Reports/S00106777.

One of the biggest accomplishments for the partners was being on the leading edge of an educational movement that is sweeping across the country at the present time:  place-based education.  In Vermont, when people talk about place-based education, A Forest for Every Classroom and the partners who created it are always mentioned.  We have received a lot of media attention and the program is held up as a model by many people.  A Forest for Every Classroom differs from other teacher-training opportunities in several ways:

• It takes a year to accomplish the course work and up to another year to implement the service learning project;
• Every partner is constantly looking for resources, scholarships, grants, materials, and other support for teachers to help with their curriculum and service learning project.  Sometimes support is physically showing up at school board meetings to address resistance to place-based educational best practices; and
• Teachers are not dropped at the end of the coursework but are constantly given opportunities to attend reunions where additional courses are given to enhance what has already been learned, the teachers are on a listserve to share information with each other and a website is maintained through the Park Service where curriculum can be shared.  The result of this follow-through is that we have 45 teachers who feel supported, pampered, and that they have so many more opportunities to take advantage of conferences, courses and capacity building that they didn't have before they enrolled in A Forest for Every Classroom.  The partners have teachers who will teach balanced information about forest stewardship and citizenship for many years to come.
• A Forest for Every Classroom partners also help sponsor "A Promise of Place" Conferences (two so far and a third in October 2005) and teachers are offered scholarships to this conference if their schools cannot support them.

Teachers:  Almost all of the 45 teachers who have completed A Forest for Every Classroom has developed a curriculum that involves forests or natural resources and they are all out in their respective communities with their students completing service learning projects.   Most of the teachers who entered the program had never taken their students out of the school. 

Some of the accomplishments from the teachers include inventories by students of the school/town forests; building trails through school/town forests and parks; training all teachers in a school about "place-based" education best practices; building gardens in school yards and/or trails for the younger grades through the gardens; creating natural and historical "quests" within the communities and working with town select boards to solve trail problems in a town forest.  One school sent many teachers to the program and now they are transferring place'based best practices to all other teachers in that school.  Many of the curriculum are at this website: http://www.nps.gov/mabi/mabi/education/forest.htm.  The website was set up for teachers to share curriculum with other teachers. 

The future of A Forest for Every Classroom is to continue seeking funding to continue the program in Vermont and to have an evaluation completed every couple of years to study how the program has worked in the communities affected by it and what didn't work--continuous improvement.  The State of New Hampshire has approached the partners to duplicate the program there through Project Learning Tree.  All the partners want to stay involved and we are working to transfer knowledge of the program to other national, state and local parks and forest across the country to duplicate the program for not only forests, but grasslands, wetlands, refuges, deserts--anywhere there is public land.  We are writing a manual to help others duplicate the program and we have produced a DVD about it to recruit teachers and give to funders.