1. Trunk Workshop, Patti calculated from the teacher evaluations and how many students are in their programs that 1338 students will be reached per year from the 20 educators that were there! The biggest criticism was that the PLT book isn’t correlated to state standards.
2. Laura is just staying in contact with Pixel Solutions for whenever she gets the website converted. Hillary had a medical emergency and has not been able to do any typing. So we’ll work out a payment plan once she is back on her feet and has the site working again. As far as the annual payment Mary Jo suggested just exploring non-profit status a bit more and will ask Rails to Trails about their non-profit status and what it took to set up and maintain.
3. Winter Trails Day, Jan. 7, 2012 –
a. Swan Lake Ranger District will participate with snowshoeing on the Blacktail cross country trails
b. Mary Beth said Lone Pine is having guided snowshoe hikes every Saturday as soon as there is snow and the $5 rental will be waived on Winter Trails Day at Lone Pine
c. Glacier will start their normal weekend snowshoe hikes that day
d. Diann Ericson said that Swan Ecosystem Center will also have a snowshoe hike that day. e. Laura will contact Teresa about coordinating the publicity for these and see if Teresa has contacted Brett at Ravenwood about participating.
4. Carhart Wilderness Workshop – Feb. 10-11, 2012. Laura will attach flyer from Steve Archibald and send out with the meeting minutes to CORE participants. Our role is just to get the word out to help fill the workshop. There is no lodging set up for Friday night at this time but people interested can talk to Brett Holmquist at Ravenwood when they sign up to see about that option. Lunch on Saturday is on your own and the focus will be the 5th-8th grade lessons from the curriculum. Participants will get access to the website and lesson updates. They should be prepared to be outside for some of the activities.
5. Fireclime – Teresa and Patti went to a meeting with Jane Kapler about the education component for a model that the Missoula Fire Lab has developed for this region. High school teachers from Kalispell and Whitefish participated. The idea was to take 2 locations within the Flathead area that had very contrasting habitats and look at what model predicts for different climate scenarios. They include socio-economic and planning decisions in the scenarios.
a. FireWorks Trunk materials would be combined with the FireClime materials. So question of if Flathead CORE wants to help host or promote a FireWorks WS in the Flathead? The annual one in Missoula will come up in February. Jane is willing to do a 2-day one here if there is a place with a lab (high school?)
b. Laura will ask Teresa and maybe Glacier Institute if they want to help host this. MEA-MFT is in Billings in 2012 so maybe the FireWorks WS for October 2012? CORE is already committed to helping with the state early childhood conference on these dates but perhaps both could be done.
c. Forest for Every Classroom is taking applications for Lower Clark Fork region. See the Montana Environmental Educators website for more information, http://www.montanaeea.org/professional/AForestforEveryClassroom.htm
6. MT off highway vehicle ethics education program. Is there interest here for this? The discussion was that this is probably not best use of academic time for a school to get involved in this (more of a weekend, family activity). Not much support from CORE folks at meeting as far as us playing a role in this as those of us attending do not have off highway vehicle use in our areas.
7. A request from Swan Ecosystem Center to switch our meeting dates off of the 1st Thursday of the month. So it was agreed to switch March 1 date to March 8. 8. Also, Diann Ericson is looking for someone to take her volunteer spot on the MEEA Board by next summer. The person would be a “member-at-large” which means the monthly phone conference. A teacher or an agency person added to the MEEA Board would be a big plus. It only takes a lot of time from January to the end of March each year preparing for the annual MEEA conference. 9. Let’s talk about Earth Day at our January meeting which will be back at the Flathead Conservation District office of January 19, 2012.