Kid’s Environmental Education Program
The Fieldtrip to Hunters Point Shipyard
We encouraged children to get inspired by their hands-on experiments and to draw directly from nature in their KEEP! Journals. Connecting with nature is the essence of nature preservation and art.
Children learn how naturalists conduct water quality testing at Heron’s Head Park, then they each sample the Bay waters to test for pH, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and phosphates as they have been shown. Their test results are accumulated and shared with the SF Water Quality Board.
KEEP! students visit City Hall to meet the Mayor (Gavin Newsom at the time), their Supervisor, and the Department of the Environment, and for a tour of the historic building. Challenged by the Mayor, children wrote essays about what they would do if they were Mayor for a day. The winners from each school were invited to return to City Hall to be Mayor for the Day.
About KEEP! (Kid’s Environmental Education Program) The Children’s Mural Program (CMP) provides instruction in visual art techniques as a basis of a curriculum to explore various environmental issues of concern to the community, especially the Super-fund Cleanup and Reuse of Hunters Point Shipyard.
New Visions/Broadened Scope: The Bayview Opera House received a grant in January 2001, from the Urban Resources Partnership (URP) (a collaboration between the US Department of Agriculture and the US Forest Service serving major cities across the nation since 1994) to expand the Children’s Mural Program to provide a comprehensive environmental education curriculum for SF elementary school children in both the fourth and fifth grades.
A second-year component to the CMP, called The Bayview Opera House Environmental Education Program (BEEP!) [now called KEEP! (Kid’s Environmental Education Program)] for Community Elementary Schools, has provided workshops in the schools and field trips into the community for hands-on experiences related to the environment at 1) Hunters Point Shipyard presented by: the US Navy, the EPA, the environmental clean-up scientists working at HPS (TetraTech), the urban planning team designing HPS (SMWM), the SF Redevelopment Agency, SF Planning Department, BAYCAT, the HPS developers (Lennar/BVHP Partners and the CAC (Citizen’s Advisory Committee for Reuse of Hunters Point Shipyard; 2) Heron’s Head Park presented by LEJ (Literacy for Environmental Justice); 3) Decorative Plant Services; 4) City Hall presented by Mayors Brown and Newsom, Supervisors Sue Beirman and Sophie Maxwell; and 5) the Bayview Opera House presented by the six Artist/Instructors there.
The CMP proposal funded by URP also established guidelines for integrating the CMP/KEEP environmental education curricula into the fourth and fifth-grade elementary school teaching units. This provides a more effective, holistic learning experience for ~400 children each year and for easier, more integrated lesson planning for the teachers. Additionally, this curricula can be used as a model for bringing this important information about the history, Super-fund Clean-up and re-use of Hunters Point Shipyard, and the need for stewardship of the environment to additional neighborhood elementary schools in the Mission, Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, and Visitation Valley. The student populations in these neighborhoods, along with Bayview Hunters Point, will be most affected by this enormous transformation of this expansive SF bayfront property over the next twenty years as the clean-up and reuse of the shipyard progresses. Think Round, Inc. was founded to fund the expansion of both the Children’s Mural Program and KEEP! to these additional schools and to recapture our elementary school students by providing middle and high school curricula to schools in these neighborhoods.
KEEP! in four years has taken approximately 750 children—with KEEP! Journals and cameras in hand—on community-focused environmental education field trips.
We are currently looking for volunteers to help us revive this program after the pandemic. If you’re interested please contact us below: