Environmental issues will present some of the most complex, challenging, and important issues of the next century. Our kids and grandkids need to be ready to tackle them.
Maine Audubon is assisting Maine’s Department of Education (DOE) and other state agencies and organizations to draft an Environmental Literacy Plan for Maine. The plan would help qualify the state’s K-12 public schools for federal environmental education funding, and help ensure that Maine’s students will graduate from high school as environmentally literate citizens who have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to tackle 21st-century environmental challenges.
No Child Left Inside
Maine Audubon's work to create an Environmental Literacy Plan for Maine is an outgrowth of its work with the nation-wide No Child Left Inside Coalition, which is working at the federal level to deliver meaningful and robust education about the natural world.
The No Child Left Inside Act strengthens and expands environmental education in America's classrooms. Specifically, it:
Provides federal funding to states to train teachers in environmental education and to operate model environmental education programs, which include outdoor learning.
Provide funding to states that create environmental literacy plans to ensure that high school graduates are environmentally literate.
Provides funding through an environmental education grant program to build state and national capacity.
Re-establishes an Office of Environmental Education within the U.S. Department of Education.
Please send a letter to our U.S. Senators in support of No Child Left Inside.
Summer 2010 update: This spring, Maine Audubon, Maine Department of Education, the Maine Department of Conservation, and the Maine Environmental Education Association hosted public dialogues across the state to discuss environmental literacy.
AUGUSTA — Maine stands to share in millions of federal dollars to expand environmental education into the general curriculum. A unique new agreement among Maine agencies and environmental education organizations is set to help Maine students graduate from high school as “environmentally literate” citizens. Read more.
No Child Left Inside