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Is erosion always bad? Eighteen teachers from eleven northwest school districts grappled with this question at an in-person Connecting Communities Through Wetland Education workshop in March, a collaborative effort between Padilla Bay Estuarine Reserve and PEI. The workshop’s focus was highlighting diverse perspectives of Skagit County communities impacted

From moderating a panel of natural resources and conservation professionals to sharing projects with their legislators, students took the lead at the 2025 Environmental & Sustainability Literacy Student Summit. PEI and the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) co-hosted the annual event. Twenty-one student groups ranging

After screening his documentary Elemental: Reimagining Fire, producer Ralph Bloemers took an unusual step. Instead of just answering questions from the audience at the 2025 Inland Tree Conference about the film, which discussed the challenges of managing human communities in fire-prone western states, he asked if any firefighters

Note: PEI served as the fiscal sponsor for a civic engagement curriculum development project led by Lisa Eschenbach and David Ketter. Now that curriculum, Student Climate Assembly: Climate Change in the Civics Classroom, is complete. In the following article, Eschenbach shares the development process and ways educators can

“STEM and Spanish!!” “STEM Professional Development is never for Dual Language educators.” Those comments are the answers that two participants at a recent Bilingual ELA Performance Task workshop gave to the question, “Why attend?” Spanish-language resources for science and STEM are indeed rare. PEI’s Multicultural Engagement Coordinator Lourdes

The saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is especially true when it comes to dual-language learning, as a group of North Thurston Public Schools teachers discovered at a January workshop. During a nature journaling exercise, the instructions were in pictures rather than in words. “We highlighted

An in-person Thursday night workshop at the PEI office in December turned out to be less like a training and more like a party. The teachers who attended were all already engaging in outdoor learning with their students, and guest speakers stayed for all or most of the

Employees at Olympia School District’s central office would have seen an unusual sight if they looked out their windows on December 11th: a group of middle school teachers repeatedly walking around the building, looking up and down, as they attempted to determine how stormwater flowed from the roof

Lead pollution, microplastics, environmental impacts of vaping, the effects of pesticides on the environment and human health, watershed restoration, saving the southern resident orcas, upcycling and reducing food waste. These are just some of the topics that students of all ages from across the state will present at

Setting up a salmon tank in your classroom is intimidating, especially for teachers who have never done it before. The assembly process alone is daunting, not to mention the required care and maintenance that follow – and that’s before any consideration of integrating curriculum.  But what if an