It Takes a Village – A Village with a Park

Lessons from the Land, Beyond the Classroom Walls

 

By Steve Kline, ESLC President and CEO 

You’ve no doubt heard the saying the best classrooms don’t have walls. Early in my own life, I felt the strong pull of the outdoors as a place of personal growth and knowledge. It was in the outdoors with my fellow Boy Scouts where I learned important lessons of teamwork and leadership. And it was in the public forests of Western Maryland where I learned early lessons in patience, quiet, and focus. And on a Calvert County tobacco farm, there were often back-aching classes in the value of hard work.

And even traditional classroom lessons came to life once I made it outside. Biology lessons made far more sense in the duck blind than they ever did on the chalkboard. And the poignancy of the poetry in my English literature textbook, spoke to me clearer in the stern seat of a canoe than from a high school desk.

I suspect you, too, if you were to list all the various things that make you who you are, might not put a classroom first on the list. But I’d reckon you’ve got an outdoor experience or two that helped shape you. And indeed, those days afield keep on offering their lessons long after youthful schooldays. I still learn something every time I go outside, when I remember to slow down and listen.

Rest assured, it is not New Year sentimentality that causes me to spend so much time writing and reflecting on how we build our lives. Maryland finds itself, again, in dire budget straits. Another billion-plus dollar structural deficit looms for a state legislature that gathers in Annapolis for a 90-day session starting tomorrow. This in addition to the three billion the state struggled to find a year ago.

As you’d expect, this budget wrangling forces difficult choices that almost always impact conservation. One hundred million dollars has already been cut from Program Open Space, a decision which has paused important ESLC projects in Talbot and Cecil counties and slowed progress everywhere else in the state.

The budget challenges Maryland faces are complicated and wide-ranging. But any reading of the state’s budget forecasts shows that a substantial driver of our structural deficit is the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a legislated plan to increase education funding by nearly $4 billion by fiscal year 2034. The plan is a big enough fish, in a small enough pond, that it risks consuming much else of real value.

As someone who sat in Maryland’s public schools from kindergarten until my undergraduate graduation ceremony, far be it for me to downplay the importance of strong funding for public education; that is not the point of this letter and not an argument I would ever make. But there can be no question kids need more than well-funded schools to thrive, to build lives of deep meaning and to become good citizens of the world.

It is often said it takes a village to raise a kid. And what kind of village doesn’t have a park? Kids need playgrounds and fresh air. Kids need to squirm their toes in muddy river bottoms and to delight in the playful racket a pileated woodpecker makes along the hardwood forest trail. Kids need to camp out with their friends and have the chance to watch a red and white bobber disappear under the water’s surface. Heck, adults need all those things, too.

Faced with the need to make tough budget decisions, the funding to help conserve the classrooms of the great outdoors can be viewed as low-hanging fruit, ripe for diversion to some other priority. But like a well-functioning ecosystem needs a fabric of different habitat types, humans, too, need a diversity of experiences to thrive. Education is essential. Cutting conservation funding ignores just how much learning we all do outside, long after the bell has rung.