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What a unique opportunity for a family event at Kennedy Creek! On a beautiful day in between stormy ones, approximately thirteen families totaling forty people got together to discover and enjoy the spring signs of life at the natural area in Kennedy Creek. With ten staff and volunteers

The La Salle High School campus includes a number of unusual features: a fish hatchery, a stream, and . . . screw traps. What are screw traps, you ask?  These large floating metal containers consist of a cone, a trap box and pontoons. When juvenile salmon and steelhead swim

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used for everything from traffic mapping and planning flight paths to plant identification and weather forecasting. The set of tools for collecting and/or mapping data have become indispensable within a wide range of industries, including real estate, urban planning and utilities. But few

It had been drizzling throughout the day during The Sailing Foundation’s Youth Sailing Leadership Forum – until, naturally, it was time to go outside for a field experience. Then, it started pouring.  “The participants were mostly sailing instructors,” says PEI’s Northwest FieldSTEM Coordinator Amy Keiper-Gowan, “so their response

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