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Riverview YESS Crew Youth Engaged in Sustainable Systems (YESS) Wraps Up Another Summer This summer, 60 high school students from around Washington State participated in the Youth Engaged in Sustainable Systems summer program. They engaged in PEI’s Forest Management and Restoration Ecology frameworks, exploring potential careers with their

Educators got a hands-on experience of forestry techniques for managing wildfire. To misquote Shakespeare, wildfire by any other name burns just as hot. Doesn’t it? Yes and no. All wildfires have certain things in common, but the landscapes where they occur significantly affect how they manifest. Wildfires in

Twenty-three K-12 educators from nine school districts in Spokane, Pend Oreille, and Stevens Counties spent two days this June at Kalispel Tribe Indian Creek Community Forest for an Engaging Communities in Forest Education workshop. Pacific Education Institute, Kalispel Natural Resources Department, and Pend Oreille Conservation District hosted and

In the winter of 2024, the Pacific Education Institute (PEI) joined forces with Central Washington University’s (CWU) STEM Leadership Master’s program, embarking on an unprecedented collaboration. Dr. Emilie Hancock and Dr. Mark Oursland of CWU, alongside PEI Associate Director Megan Rivard, spearheaded a project aimed at revolutionizing STEM

Mead Outdoor School students experimented with different materials to filter food waste water. This spring, a team of engineers gathered to tackle an urgent environmental challenge: how to keep food waste out of the water that eventually ends up in our soil. They created prototypes using materials like

For some students, the walk to Curtain Falls was their first ever hiking experience. Orin C. Smith Elementary School teacher Jordan Duncan was PEI’s FieldSTEM Teacher of the Year in 2023. Here he recounts a memorable visit to Cispus Learning Center for Chehalis students and teachers. It is

Teachers in the Braiding Sweetgrass workshop shared that they had been wanting to read the book for years. One of the rarest gifts a teacher can receive is time. Amid the relentless demand to deliver content, meet standards, attend meetings, manage behavior, and communicate with parents, opportunities to

SCD’s Forest Program Manager Garth Davis led a 2-hour tour around the organization’s unique property. Whether you climbed a neighborhood apple tree as a child or enjoy visiting your favorite magnolia in an urban park, you probably have some connection to trees. Thinking about those connections was a

Iron Horse Brewery supplies 1,400,000 pounds of 2-row gain to Beard Ranch per year. ‘A group of teachers’ walks into a bar’ sounds like the setup for a groan-worthy joke, probably involving a pun. However, if the teachers in question just finished PEI’s Asynchronous Food Waste workshop, they

In April, 54 educators from 17 different K-12 schools came together for a week at Camp Koinonia in Cle Elum to learn how to develop overnight outdoor school programming for 5th and 6th-grade students by participating in the 2024 Outdoor School Washington Spring Training. PEI’s team facilitated many