An innovative interdisciplinary program for freshmen at Riverside-Brookfield High School will not be offered next year. The School of Environmental Education, better known as the SEE Team, is being eliminated due to reduced interest among incoming freshmen and the need for larger classes due to budget cuts.
Only 42 incoming freshmen signed up to be part of the SEE Team next year, the fewest since the program began in 2005.
School officials were surprised by the lackluster response and had no intention of eliminating the program until they saw the enrollment figures.
“It’s really an exciting, contemporary program,” said Interim Superintendent David Bonnette. “It’s disappointing that there wasn’t a better response.”
During the 2010-11 school year 57 freshmen are enrolled in the SEE Team. They are divided among three sections. Enrollment in the SEE Team reached a high of 76 students in the 2007-08 school year.
But finances also played a role in the decision to cut the program, said Tim Scanlon, the school’s assistant principal for curriculum and instruction, and one of the program’s architects
“It came down to a financial issue, not just an enrollment issue,” Scanlon said.
The driving forces behind the creation of the SEE Team were Scanlon, former Science Department chairman Troy Gobble and former Superintendent/Principal Jack Baldermann.
Scanlon, who helped form a biology/English team at Andrew High School before he came to RBHS, was disappointed by the need to abolish the SEE Team.
“It’s heartbreaking, because it just doesn’t serve an educational function, it serves a social function,” Scanlon said. “It was one of our main ways of developing stewards for the environment, but it’s understandable from a financial perspective when so many other worthy and important things had to be cut, too.”
In the SEE Team program freshmen biology, English, algebra and wellness classes are taught around the theme of the environment. Students learn the basic skills of their core courses while learning about the environment and environmental issues.
For example, in English class the SEE Team students read books with environmental themes such as The Omnivores Dilemma, Seed and Hot Zones.
The SEE Team worked closely with the Brookfield Zoo in a cooperative arrangement that included students working to restore the Zoo Woods to a more natural habitat. SEE Team students have also presented reports on various environmental issues to zoo personnel.
The program stressed active learning. This year, students participated in six field trip work days. They sorted donations at a recycling center, did odd jobs at a local dairy farm and helped out at a small West Chicago business that grows and sells organic vegetables.
They debated environmental issues such as drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness or hunting wolves in Yellowstone National Parks.
The teachers who taught the SEE Team were passionate about the program.
“It has been a transformative experience for me as a teacher and a person,” said RB teacher Daniel Mancoff, who has taught English for the SEE Team for the past three years. “I’m a very different person for having taught on that team, and I can’t imagine a better way to have spent three years. It’s the best teaching experience that I’ve ever had.”
But the reduced enrollment by incoming freshmen in the SEE Team coupled with the need for larger class sizes as a result of the budget cuts spelled the end for program, even though the SEE Team was not originally identified as a cut that would be made if the April 5 referendum failed.
“We’re down to around 15 students a section,” Bonnette said. “Normally we get about 65 to 75 kids that elect the SEE Team. We did not want to eliminate this program, but given the other kinds of choices we’re having to make, we just couldn’t carry it at that level for 42 kids.”
Some incoming freshmen don’t sign up for the SEE Team because the program’s math component is algebra and they have already taken algebra in eighth grade. And the SEE Team classes conflict with band and orchestra, leading other students who might be interested to not sign up.
Bonnette suggested that perhaps the SEE Team didn’t market itself to incoming freshmen as aggressively as some elective departments do. Darcy Lewis, the parent of a student who was part of the SEE Team as a freshman, said some eighth-graders didn’t really know what the SEE Team was.
But she mourned the loss of the program.
“I think it will be a huge loss,” said Lewis. “I think it’s a really special program that sets RB apart from other schools, and I hope it will be brought back soon.”