Bianca Cassouto, the Director of Education for the Everglades Foundation, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the organization.
What is the Everglades Literacy program?
Cassouto said, “There are many reasons why the Everglades is important, and so in 2014 the Board of Directors commissioned the creation of our Everglades Literacy program, which is our free education program for teachers and students across Florida to learn about the Everglades in the classroom. As teachers are the one of the most trusted sources of environmental education for children. So this program exists to make sure that teachers and students understand the importance, the value and just how beautiful the Everglades is.”
Why is it so important for people in the Florida Keys to understand the Everglades?
Cassouto said, “The number one reason that I would say is that millions of Floridians get their drinking water from the Florida Everglades, and that includes everyone who lives in the Florida Keys, as well as all of the visitors that come to the Keys. So it’s important for residents and visitors and everyone alike to understand such a precious resource that we rely on every day. The Everglades is also home to wildlife that can only be found here in our backyard, and what you want is for your students to be able to know what’s in their backyard. It’s great that they know animals and plants from around the world, but if they can’t identify what’s here and why it’s important, and if it’s endangered and needs to be helped, then we come in to fill those gaps with our Everglades Literacy program.”
How much does the literacy program cost?
Cassouto said, “This program is absolutely free for any educator across the state. All of our free curriculum is available online on our website. Any teacher can access pre K through 12 standards aligned curriculum, and they can bring a variety of topics into the classroom, like changes to the watershed, habitats, animals, plants, threats to the Everglades and why water is so important to us. Across the state, we’ve worked with more than 8,000 teachers in 32 school districts, and in the Keys alone, we’ve worked with more than 160 teachers in almost 20 schools.”
What schools have worked with the Everglades Literacy program?
Cassouto said, “We’ve worked with schools from up and down in the Keys areas. We have a special champion schools program that recognizes schools that have made Everglades part of their school culture, which means having their teachers use our curriculum in the classroom, work with student ambassadors around the school to educate them about how they can protect the Everglades, educating the community and other project examples. So these champion schools, we have three in Monroe, including Key Largo School, Ocean Studies Charter School, and Sugarloaf School, with a couple new ones coming on board this year, hopefully. So we are very excited and always welcome to accept more schools to work with down in that area. It’s free, which is really important for teachers to be able to have access to quality, sound science materials that are available to them for free. Every teacher that comes to one of our professional development sessions is handed a bag of printed lessons and materials so they are ready to start implementing in the classroom. And our curriculum is not just for science teachers. It works for teachers who also teach reading and language arts, social studies, math. There’s always a connection to make back to the Everglades. We spend a couple hours with teachers at their school, and we go through some of our important lessons that help to educate teachers about the changes of the Everglades throughout history, so the historic versus the altered Everglades, and then they work with watershed models, hands on sorting cards to learn more about the habitats and the wildlife that live here. And really what we do is we spend some time with the teachers for them to feel prepared and equipped to come back into the classroom and know how to implement those lessons easily, because they just took the time to to learn a little bit more about our program, hands on with our team members.”
Can parents help?
Cassouto said, “It’s really important for parents to be involved. What we hear is that students come home after they’ve learned about the Everglades, and they share with their parents. And the parents want to know, I’d love to learn more about how I can keep this conversation going at the dinner table, at home with my kids. So we do offer some bite size additional instructional materials that are fun activities for parents that they can do them at home, that’s available on our website again, and a couple times a year, we host an online virtual webinar called Families for Everglades, where we encourage families to join us and learn about a special Everglades topic, which can vary anything from sea turtles of the Everglades to mangroves of the Everglades, learning more about historic figures in the Everglades and just a variety of topics that bring this all back to the community and to families.”
The Everglades Foundation has been hard at work for 30 years.
Cassouto said, “The work of the Everglades Foundation is critical, providing the science for restoration, which we know is so important now more than ever, and it’s important for us to connect with the stakeholders within the Everglades community, and just to make sure that people understand how important the Everglades is from an economic perspective, from an intrinsic perspective, and of course, making sure that everyone who lives here and who comes to visit, which is millions of people a year, understand that it’s not just the Everglades, but it’s America’s Everglades, and this is an important area for all of us, which means that it takes all of us in different levels to be able to protect this incredible ecosystem that is here in our backyard.”
For more information, click here: https://www.evergladesfoundation.org