The School of Environmental Studies
Apple Valley, MN

An SES Backpacking Trip on The Lake Superior Trail

Imagine a small school that overlooks a pond and is surrounded by woods and a path that leads to the nearby Minnesota Zoo. Imagine that the atmosphere of the school is one where students are friends with their teachers, where learning is hands-on, field related, and intimate. Imagine that the space created by the school encourages individual ideas within a group setting. This was my high school, The School of Environmental Studies.

To make the jump from focusing on clothes and social status to thinking about community and education as a junior in high school was hard, but I am so thankful that I challenged myself and saw it through. This is the place where I first found community and connection in my life, the high school that we called Zoo School. It is a two-year high school, connected with the Minnesota Zoo, in Apple Valley, Minnesota. Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, the Zoo School is a public school that attempted and, frankly, succeeded and continues to succeed in connecting students to the surrounding community through interdisciplinary education.

Lake Superior Fun

Upon entering the school, you immediately notice the open and communal atmosphere. Simply from walking around the small building that houses only 400 junior and senior high school students, it is obvious that this school is dedicated to hands-on, relevant, and tangible education.

Walking upstairs through the open classrooms, you see four different student areas called “houses,” and within each house ten different “pods”. Instead of lockers, each student has his or her own desk with which they can decorate and collaborate with their nine other “podmates.”

What had originally attracted me to Zoo School was not the communal style of education, but the thematic studies courses. At the end of every trimester we had the option of taking one class for roughly ten days. These classes included on campus studies of marine biology at the zoo, indigenous cultures, equine investigation, art, and video creations, as well as off campus studies in Chile, Africa, Scotland, the Yucatan Peninsula, Alaska, the Southwestern United States and the Boundary Waters. Each thematic studies class focused on environmental issues and created learning situations that a student isn't often able to have during normal school schedules of six different classes.

Thematic Study in Chile: Backpacking
and Learning about Forestry

Although I loved the thematic studies that I took, I began to appreciate even more SES's way of educating. I was able to create classes or projects according to my own interests, and when I wasn't the classes available integrated both classroom learning such as lectures, speakers, readings, and discussions, as well as an outdoor component of experiencing and experimenting with what we had learned indoors.

My community encompassed friends, teachers and surrounding community members of Apple Valley, Rosemount, and Eagan. An example of this was Junior year, my first year. We were given a pond project where our pod chose a specific pond from one of the surrounding cities, and found ph levels, canoed out to the middle of the pond to determine depth, made species counts, and checked trophic levels and oxygen levels. We spent weeks learning what types of species are indicators determining the health of ecosystems. We learned how to use appropriate equipment and how to work together. When our projects were finished, taking the shape of a written report and poster board, we presented them to city officials. Essentially we researched, learned, and compiled information for the community so that the individual cities would not have to hire staff to do the studies themselves.

Paddling MN

As is evident with my CIS major, my love for this type of education has never left me. It makes sense to me to incorporate and utilize the tools of a community in the best way we can. Schools need to educate and teach students, and cities have budgets and must obtain information and ideas for planning and land management, so it makes sense to combine the two areas.

Another favorite unit we had was winter outdoor survival. We spent weeks learning about the science of winter communities, studying winter adaptations of local animals and plants, and reading literature from writers like Jack London. After our indoor test of essays on the stories and science we read, we had our outdoor final. In teams of four to five people, we constructed “survival kits,” strapped on our boots, put wood, food and tarps on a sled, and trekked off into the surrounding woods with our compasses. We were required to find different checkpoints throughout the forest, eventually ending at a campsite where we were to build a snow shelter, start a fire, and feed our teachers and ourselves a meal.

Winter Outdoor Survival

This hands-on approach opened my eyes to the possibility that learning was fun, and what a concept that was! Prior to SES, school was competitive and a social obligation. This type of education made room for many different styles of learning, and again it made sense to me .

Senior year we were asked to do an independent community service project of fifty hours. I chose to work at the Minnesota Zoo's farm. I put my 4-H skills to work learning how to milk cows, check for eggs, muck out stalls, plow a field with draft horses the old-fashioned way, and how to communicate with zoo workers and the public. I loved it so much that I volunteered for 75 hours instead. I am positive you will not find many high schools where students are so engaged with their education that they are motivated enough to put an extra 25 hours of work into one of their projects.

Independant Study Working at the MN Zoo Farm

This school has taught me that it is necessary to have an attachment to a temporary place. The Zoo School is only a junior/senior School, yet the attachment I made in those two years has helped me to often look back in retrospect and realize both what I have learned and what I continue to learn from this observed growth. Despite my graduating nearly four years ago, I continue to draw connections between my different majors and senior projects in college and the framework of education that I learned at the Zoo School.

I never thought I would have such an intense interest and connection to environmental studies within my education. In my first year of college however, I realized that I wasn't connecting to my place, I was never outside, and I had no idea about St. Olaf's natural lands or the amazing Northfield community. I was learning from books alone and I missed what I had experienced at SES. This led me to investigate both an Environmental Studies Major as well as a major of my own, Interpretive Studies in Sustainable Development.

I tend to believe that a place that you have connected to will never leave you. The community I found and learned that I needed at the Zoo School and the way I learned to use my surroundings as a classroom continue to be very important life lessons that I was able to share with the college. This place will also never leave me as I continue to see some of my teachers at events that I am either watching or participating in. This shows me what an interconnected community we live in. I think it is an even better reflection of my time spent at the Zoo School that I have learned more about myself after my SES experience. The more and more experienced and involved in my collegiate education I become, the more I begin to see how SES has swept me into it's legacy. This shows a very real connection that I will never forget, one that I will always respect, and one that continues through to today.

Mr. Carlson Handing Back Papers