Local kids learn hands-on local ecology lessons

Wide-eyed and wiggly, 87 baby brook trout dart about their fish tank in Tiffany Bates’s third-grade classroom on a bluebird day in April. Hatched from eggs in January, the trout, or fry, are two inches long, and seem curious and excited about everything in the world around them: specks of algae floating by, other fish, pebbles lining the bottom of the tank, students peering in.

Bates’s third graders are a lot like that, too.

“Getting to actually see them go from eggs to alevin to fry now is so cool!” says Annabelle Tuller, age 8, a student in Bates’s class at the White River Valley School in South Royalton, VT.

By the end of the school year, the students will learn not only about the trout’s lifecycle, but how complex changes in land use, climate and local and even global economies can affect these feisty little trout. In June, the third-graders will release their fish into the wild. But first, today, they will learn, first-hand, how the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department goes about raising and releasing around 650,000 hatchery-raised fish across the state each year, providing an important boost to the recreation economy.

The students dash about grabbing gear and coats and mud boots, then pile into a school bus and head to nearby McIntosh Pond. There, they will help stock 600 rainbow trout and 800 brookies. Taking turns, the students grab five-gallon buckets of fish from the hatchery truck and bring them to pond to set them free. “Goodbye, fishy!” one shouts, watching the fish dash this way and that in their new home.

Afterwards, they hold a pond-side class discussion about what they have learned so far this year: how the Ice Age carved the local landscape, how the ocean once covered 40 percent of the state, that indigenous people settled here 12,000 years ago, how an 11,500-year-old beluga whale skeleton was unearthed in Charlotte, VT in 1849, how sheep and dairy farms altered the forests and local waterways – even why the names of local roads echo historic shifts in Vermont’s landscapes, economy, culture and population.

“I wanted to do so much more with this than just teach them about trout,” says Bates, a Vermont native and farmer who has taught in local K-12 schools for 10 years. “I wondered: How can I teach third-graders about climate change and let them see and really understand how it affects everything around them, including trout and everything that they rely on, right here where they live?”

A grant from the Charitable Foundation’s Wellborn Ecology Fund helped Bates to develop an innovative year-long curriculum based on the Trout in the Classroom experience, a national program of Trout Unlimited. Celebrating its 25^th year in 2026, the Wellborn Ecology Fund supports place-based ecology education, focusing on K-12 and early childhood education centers in underserved communities in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire and Vermont. Bates’s school was awarded the grant through the Wellborn-funded Equitable Climate Action Partnership, which aims to build place-based climate literacy and solutions in the Upper Valley.

“Getting the grant opened up so many possibilities, especially field trips,” says Bates, who has taken her class to visit the state fish hatchery in Roxbury, Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock, Vt., Junction Fiber Mill, Green Mountain Linen and several nearby farms.

At McIntosh Pond, Bates asks students how the landscape has been changed since Europeans arrived nearly 300 years ago. One after another, the students relate how the land shifted from being 95 percent forested to 80 percent fields by the mid-1800s as farmers cleared land to raise sheep. They also point out local landmarks that speak to other reasons the land was cleared.

“Like Potash Hill Road that we passed on the way here. I didn’t even know what potash was before,” says Theo Leavitt, 8.

Potash, the class learned, is an alkaline potassium that Colonial Era settlers made by boiling water mixed with the ashes of hardwood trees. By clearing and burning the forest, they created what was once New England’s most important export commodity to Europe. Essential to making soap, textiles, gunpowder, glass and ceramics, potash provided farmers a ready source of cash, along with cleared fields for raising sheep, dairy cows and other livestock. It’s said that burning a single acre of forest produced enough potash to purchase an acre of land.

Later in the day, the class visited Fools Farm in Tunbridge, VT, where they learned about sustainable farming practices that are helping farmers to adjust to increasingly dramatic swings in extreme weather, from droughts to flooding to warmer winters. Farmer Caroline Sherman-Gordon explained how the farm’s sheep are moved to fresh grass once or twice a day, which reduces soil erosion into local streams and keeps the sheep and the fields healthier, while helping to maintain a clean, cold, fast-running brook nearby that provides ideal habitat for brook trout.

During their visit, Bates’s third graders chipped in to plant long rows of willow and dogwood tree saplings along a seasonal streambed cutting across the farm’s fields. As the trees mature, their dense roots will anchor the soil and reduce runoff, while the trees will provide shade for sheep on hot days.

“It will be nice for them to come back here in 10 or 20 years and see all these trees grown up and they can say, ‘See? I helped plant those,’ ” said Sherman-Gordon, who started Fools Farm in 2022 with her wife, Elspeth Sherman, reclaiming an old farm that had been turned into a vacation-home property.

At the end of their school year, Bates’s class published a 66-page illustrated book that the students wrote and illustrated about their experiences.

“I really love seeing them being able to make connections between all these things right around them – local farms, our forests, the climate and local history – and to understand how our decisions make a real impact,” Bates says.