National Park Service Program Expanding STEM Instruction

Education Week (12/13, Fleming) reports profiles "NatureBridge, a residential environmental field-science program in partnership with the National Park Service," noting that some 200 6th graders have recently started attending the program, which over 40 years "has served close to 1 million children from all over the country at four national parks on the West Coast: Yosemite, Olympic, Golden Gate, and the Santa Monica Mountains. This coming spring, the program will expand to the East Coast, with the help of a $4 million grant from Google Inc., to set up camp in the Prince William National Park, about 40 minutes outside the nation's capital." The group's efforts, Education Week notes, come "alongside a national push to improve the quality of STEM-or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-instruction, in light of US students' lackluster test performance compared with many of their international peers'." The piece continues to describe pending collaboration between ED and Interior on STEM and the Green Ribbon Schools program.