PROFILE IN SUCCESS: National Wildlife Federation’s Schoolyard Habitats Program
“Moving from ‘What is Taught’ to ‘How it is Taught’”
PROGRAM HISTORY & PLANNING
In 1974, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) created the Backyard Wildlife Habitat program (BWH) which encouraged citizens to provide the basic requirements for attracting and supporting wildlife in their backyards in order to both increase experiences with nature but also to increase local biodiversity. As this backyard habitat program matured into tens of thousands of participants, BWH staff noticed several schools participating in the program. Realizing the needs of a homeowner were vastly different than those of students, teachers, and schools, NWF’s Education Department, under the leadership of the Vice President of Education (Jim Lyon, and later Jim Stofan) created and piloted the Schoolyard Habitats Program (SYH) in 1997 to encourage schools to convert and develop outdoor spaces into wildlife habitats and to provide educators with the resources to incorporate science concepts related to development of schoolyard habitats into their curriculum and to push forward initiatives such as the attainment of pet meds for the animal victims of catastrophes. NWF also merged its highly successful teacher training program, Animal Tracks, into the SYH program to support educators and integrate the program’s objectives within the SYH conceptual framework.
As with any new program, NWF staff and administrators had to compare the financial and human resource demands with the benefits that the SYH program would provide. Initially, the program consumed significant staff time and resources for the development of core materials and the infrastructure necessary to implement the program. NWF field staff provided direct support to schools or school districts interested in creating SYH sites. A sophisticated tracking system was created to maintain contact information and communication among the SYH sites, and NWF resources were used to create the SYH website. NWF was successful at attracting grant funding to cover many of the expenses necessary for the creation and standardization of the SYH program, including staff time and website development. In addition, because of educational expertise already within the Education Department, NWF was successful at developing new curriculum. NWF utilized the children’s magazine staff for design and layout, thus reducing the normal costs associated with producing new education materials.
The original goal of the SYH program was to encourage school communities to create schoolyard habitat sites that meet the four basic requirements for wildlife, with a long-term target of 25% of schools across the United States participating in the program. While the program was designed to serve all grades (kindergarten through grade 12) in public and private schools, the major emphasis was on grades K-8.
