Moreno Valley teacher leads the way connecting children to nature and inspiring future land stewards.

Kyle Gerhard, an 8^th grade science teacher at Palm Middle School in Moreno Valley brings his passion for nature and hiking into his classroom with both curriculum and outdoor experiences. He starts his regular science course with a unit on human impacts on the environment and quickly immerses his students in hands-on experiences.

School custodians gather a day’s worth of school trash. The trash is weighed and then students are tasked with separating it into recycling, compost and trash that will be sent to the landfill. Students have a goal of reducing what will be sent to the landfill and are surprised that they can reduce the waste by at least 50 percent. Experiences like this bring clarity to human impacts on land, air and water, but Gerhard also wants kids to understand why it matters.

“Where I work is in an urban city and to a lot of the kids, nature is almost an abstract thing,” Gerhard said. “I want to get kids out on field trips and nature walks so that they can make a connection, understand why nature is important and why it should be protected.”

When Gerhard discovered that most of his students and their families struggle to spend time in nature, he set up a Gerhard Family Nature Walk and invited them. Attendees met him in Oak Glen at Los Rios Rancho and then the group explored Oak Glen Preserve. The invitation was so popular that it has become an annual event and now more than 100 people join Gerhard, his wife and two sons to explore nature outside of school hours.

During school hours, Gerhard plans a field trip that sums up the unit on human impact. In the past he has taken students to a wastewater treatment facility for a tour and then on a nature walk. This year, when he had to find some other options for a field trip, he thought of Rivers & Lands Conservancy. For 10 years, Gerhard had been running the trails next to his home in Beaumont at the Conservancy’s Cienega Canyon Preserve. When he reached out to us, we were excited to be a part of the hands-on experiences Gerhard provides to his students.

Students visited Lambs Canyon Landfill to see firsthand the impacts humans have on the land and how small actions can lessen our impacts. After that, they visited Cienega Canyon Preserve where they learned about coast live oak woodlands, the wildlife they support, and how nature makes us healthier and happier. They were taught about the techniques Rivers & Lands Conservancy uses to restore the oak woodlands and then assisted in watering and monitoring the restoration sites. The Palm Middle School students were enthusiastic land stewards, running gallon jugs of water by hand to give the oak seedlings a drink. It was an experience they will remember according to Gerhard.

“I get to have an impact on 130 kids a year and it’s the seeds we plant now that become the things they remember in their 20s and beyond,” he said.

Schools are often challenged with finding the funds to pay for buses to take their students on field trips. Every year, Rivers & Lands Conservancy strives to secure funding that supports busing children to our preserves and providing experiences in nature that leave a lasting impression. So many of the children who join us have their first experiences in nature with us, but they could not happen without teachers like Kyle Gerhard. There is so much doom and gloom in conservation messaging, but when you look at the faces of Gerhard’s students, the future looks bright.

 

Rivers & Lands Conservancy connects our community to natural, wild, and open spaces of Southern California through land conservation, stewardship, and education.