From Chesapeake Bay to the Monteverde Cloud Forest

While we are getting last-minute gifts, hanging garlands and hitting every holiday party in the neighborhood, Tim Decker will be teaching kids in Costa Rica about environmental and community stewardship.
    Decker teaches science at Eagle Cove School, a small, independent school for three-years-olds to fifth graders in Pasadena. Environmental education is the mission throughout the curriculum, and the Bay is a classroom. Eagle Cove is located on the Bay, and bags of oyster shells from a student project hang off the school’s pier.
    The students Decker will be teaching in Costa Rica can relate. He’s traveling to Cloud Forest School in the Monteverde Cloud Forest, a sensitive ecological system.
    Decker will deliver school supplies collected by Eagle Cove students and give a video tour of the school created by fifth graders on iPads. The director is Mackenzie Boughey, granddaughter of Bay Weekly columnist, the late Bill Burton.
    Decker hopes to establish a real-time video connection between the two schools so kids at both ends can virtually introduce themselves.
    “The project seems perfect for our students,” Decker says. “It brings together science, language, geology, culture, technology and service.”