The Kentucky Environmental Education Council is close to releasing a draft of its new five year Master Plan, which helps steer the marketing, delivery, and coordination of environmental education across the commonwealth.
The Council tried something new for the development of this plan, conducting 13 regional forums, as opposed to one centralized meeting, to diversify community input.
“We really wanted to hear from people who are outside the choir, so to speak, about ways we can better integrate at the community level,” Schmitz said. “We had a lot of new faces at every single meeting and got some outside the box ideas that I think we’ll be able to incorporate.”
After compiling input from educators, citizens, organizations and industry, the Council reframed the plan from a set of recommendations to a series of goals with measurable objectives. In addition to the master plan, the Council will develop and update an Implementation Plan that will include strategies for achieving the education goals, an idea that came from the regional forums.
Schmitz says ideas that were common across the forums included condensing the master plan and establishing measurable objectives, placing more emphasis on life-long learning by working with science centers and parks to improve environmental education outside of schools, integrating the vocabulary of sustainability into environmental education, and broadening the educational framework to include how the environment effects and is effected by society and the economy. She hopes to release the draft plan for public comment by September 15 and publish the final plan early in January.
Schmitz emphasizes that the council’s objective is to educate, not advocate, and the goal of the Kentucky Environmental Education Council is to ensure environmental literacy among Kentucky citizens of all ages.
