This fall, the Evergreen Heritage Center Foundation, in partnership with Frostburg State University, Allegany College, and Allegany County Public Schools, is offering outdoor environmental education activities for children of all ages.  Participants in this environmental education program include over 600 children and youth including three-to-five-year-olds from HRDC Project Head Start, YMCA children and teens, Juvenile Services youth, and Allegany County middle school students.  This collaborative program, which teaches children and youth about the relationship between the Western Watersheds and the Bay and how each of us can make a contribution to improving water quality, is funded by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Chesapeake Bay Trust, and Constellation Energy.

Participating children and youth learn about water quality and conservation issues by partaking in a variety of indoor and outdoor activities tailored to each age group.  In one activity, they create and simulate a watershed in a pan using clay, sponges, and spray bottles; in another activity, they learn how choices by landowners can be positive or negative for our water supply by role-playing landowners developing their properties.  After a morning of these interactive learning sessions, students participate in a restoration activity of planting a rain garden.  The rain garden, located above a pond at the Evergreen Heritage Center (EHC), will use native plants to absorb and filter storm water runoff before it enters the pond and then ultimately flows into Jennings Run, the Potomac River, and finally into the Bay.

This year, a total of 1000 local children and youth will have participated in the EHC Foundation’s flagship Environmental Education program, which began last fall with 178 children. All of the program’s activities align with the Maryland State curriculum, the objectives of STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and math), the “No Child Left Inside” initiative, the Maryland Partnership for Children in Nature (which requires one outdoor environmental education experience for each child every year), and the new Maryland Environmental Literacy Graduation Requirements (the first in the nation). 

The EHC Foundation’s other education programs include Higher Education and Research (which has provided experiential learning opportunities and job credentials for over 600 college students to date), Environmental Wellness (a new program providing experiential learning relative to living a healthy lifestyle i.e. learning how our food is grown and how to conserve our water supply), Evergreen Reads (a proactive literacy campaign scheduled to begin next year), and Environmental Arts (a planned program focusing on expressions of creativity in relation to our environment).  For more information, contact the Evergreen Heritage Center Foundation on 301-687-0664, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or visit the EHC Foundation’s web site at www.evergreenheritagecenter.org.