A small rural school in Baldwin County has turned an unused patch of grass into a certified outdoor learning laboratory, and this week that effort earned formal recognition from a statewide conservation group.
Stapleton School received certification for its outdoor classroom from the Alabama Wildlife Federation, capping off a project that has been growing quietly for roughly two decades. Principal Jim Perry said the honor means a great deal to a campus that doesn’t have some of the resources larger schools take for granted.
“We’re very delighted,” Perry said. “Our school is a terrific little rural school, small school. And we have a lot of advantages as a small school, but one of the disadvantages is we don’t have some of the things that a larger school might have, like a STEM lab or full-time STEM teacher, but we have a beautiful outdoor campus.”
What is now a multi-station outdoor learning space started as a simple butterfly garden planted in an empty parking lot years ago. Since then, teachers and students have steadily added new features, turning the area into a hands-on complement to classroom science lessons.
“We have a measuring wall, where students can compare their [wingspan] to the wingspan of Alabama birds, so they have a real way to get a sense of what widths [look like],” Perry explained. “In addition to the butterfly garden, there’s a pollinator garden, [because of] the importance of bees and other pollinators, so we help our kids learn about them.”
Students say the outdoor lessons stick with them in a way a textbook page doesn’t always manage. Fifth grader Sydney Moye said the space gives students a break from four walls without losing the educational value.
“I like it. I feel like it’s a good learning experience, other than learning in the classrooms and stuff. We can come out here and look at all the scenery and stuff,” Moye said.
Perry credited teacher Tammy Grace with getting the whole initiative off the ground by planting that first butterfly garden, a small step that eventually grew into the certified outdoor classroom the school has today.
For sixth grader Payton Sellers, watching nature unfold in real time beats reading about it after the fact.
“To me it’s way more interesting than looking at a science book and saying, ‘oh, this is how tadpoles grow,’ when really you can just come outside your classroom and be like, ‘oh yeah, tadpoles are getting bigger every day,'” Sellers said.
Certification through the Alabama Wildlife Federation comes with more than a plaque. Schools that earn the distinction also receive an outdoor classroom activity kit, and Stapleton chose a package that included a new irrigation timer, a screech owl nesting box, a wireless camera, and a set of instructional DVDs and lesson plans to help teachers tie the space back into their curriculum.
The school isn’t finished expanding the grounds. Staff plan to add a station where students can sample and identify mint, and they’re eyeing a dry creek bed installation for the fall that would help the campus handle the heavy, sudden downpours common in the area during storm season.
Stapleton now joins a small group of schools with a certified outdoor classroom in Baldwin County, one of five in the county to hold the distinction, according to Perry.