Environmental education has been part of the AAPS since 1961, when Bill Stapp organized nature field trips at Wines Elementary as a U-M dissertation project. Supported first by a gift from future AAPS environmental specialist Eunice Hendrix through the Audubon Society, then by individual schools, the program spread across the district. It won funding from the central administration in 1988.

Bill Browning led the trips for many years, first assisted by Hendrix and Vera Levenson, and later with Kay Lane and Janet Kahan.

It’s just the kind of nice-but-not essential program, like physical education, that might have been cut back as the AAPS has struggled with shrinking funding in recent years. It survived mainly because it was targeted much earlier–and supporters fought to keep it.

A passionate educator and environmentalist, Stapp went on to found the U-M’s environmental education program, helped organize the first Earth Day, and was the first head of UNESCO’s environmental education section. But by the time he died in 2001, environmental education was endangered in the district where it started.

According to Dave Szczygiel, who took over from Browning in 1997, the EE program was slated to be cut in that year, in part due to the quest to fund a new high school. To save it, community members, teachers, students, and other supporters raised $10,000 in small gifts to start a permanent endowment. The AAPS Science and Education Fund at the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation has since grown to about $260,000.

Endowment income, plus a grant from the AAPS Educational Foundation, now pays for environmental education field trips to places like Barton Dam and Recycle Ann Arbor’s ReUse Center. The goal is to let students experience the complexity and beauty of nature while learning concepts of science and history and social interactions.

One of the most demanding programs is also one of most popular: an all-day “winter survival” program where fifth-graders learn to build a fire and cook their own lunch in the woods.