EE Update May 2026

With the academic year wrapping up I thought I should share some of the education program statistics from this last year and some updates. We saw some major growth that I am super excited about!

In the last year, we have reached a total of 1959 students through education programs! How exciting!!

We had 6 on-site field trips with a total of 225 students, I delivered 6 off-site/in-classroom programs to a total of 208 students, and the park was at 4 youth education outreach events reaching 1526 people! This is a significant increase compared to the 472 people reached across 4 field trips, 3 off-site visits, and 4 outreach events last year.

This year I spent time developing lessons to take into classrooms, including 3 classroom visits to 5th graders at Mountain Vista to talk about maps and geography in their social studies class. Although we ultimately want to have more students out to the park and interacting with nature outside of the classroom, I felt it was important to develop opportunities to bring nature, the park, and experiences to the classroom for those unable to make it to the park.

The park participated in more outreach events this year, the only ones counted in my numbers were school STEM nights and youth-specific community events. We attended the Ted Walker day at Old Tucson Studios along with Picacho, which was a huge event and a big reason there was such an increase in the number of students reached.

Lastly, thank you Friends for all of your support of the park and the education program! I know you all see the importance of environmental education and I greatly appreciate your support of the work I do and the education program.