Nazirah Robinson and De’Liyah Goines were walking down a wooded path at the Belwin Conservancy when Nazirah helpfully pointed out that her friend had a flying ant on her shirt.
Much shrieking ensued.
Did the girls, both students at Humboldt High School in St. Paul, try to capture it with their bug net? No, they did not. Did they attempt to capture it inside their plastic insect cup for future study? No, they did not.
Did they happily let it fly away? Yes. Yes, they did.
“Oh, thank God!” said De’Liyah, 13, an eighth-grader, once she was bug-free. “It flew away.”
The girls were there Wednesday morning as part of the first group of special-education students from St. Paul Public Schools to visit Belwin this year. The group got to christen the conservancy’s new $3.6 million Peter J. King Family Foundation Wetlands Center in Afton, which is home to Belwin’s adaptive outdoor-education programs.
Designed to accommodate SPPS students who have special needs, the 5,000-square-foot building features support spaces like calm rooms for kids who need time to regulate their emotions, adult changing tables in accessible restrooms, low thresholds in doorways, large windows and a network of paved trails that makes exploring the woods and ponds easier for children and adults who use mobility devices.
Since 1971, Belwin has played host each year to thousands of district third- and fifth-graders who come to learn about science in the 1,600 acres that the conservancy owns in the St. Croix River Valley. The permanently protected land includes woodland, prairie, oak savanna, ponds, streams and wetlands.
The new building will help bring students with special needs into nature for outdoor science learning and immersion in wild spaces, said Katie Bloome, executive director at Belwin Conservancy.
“We know many children in this program experience significant barriers to outdoor exploration,” Bloome said. “Belwin has invested in removing those barriers so students can fully participate. It’s really great to see the smiles on kids’ faces when they’re collecting pond samples or spotting wildlife from the trail.”
Insect Bingo
The 22 students from Humboldt on Wednesday followed Christin Fleming, the SPPS teacher assigned to Belwin, on a mile-long nature walk on Wednesday morning and played “Insect Bingo.” Some walked on their own; some were pushed in joggers.
“I want everyone to just take a minute and really look,” Fleming said as she scanned the dirt next to the paved trail. “You’ve really got to look to see the bugs. Sometimes I like to turn over a little rock to see if there’s a bug under the rock. We’re looking for bugs!”
Nazirah, 14, a ninth-grader at Humboldt, carried a paperback copy of “Peterson’s First Guide to Insects of North America” by Christopher Leahy.
“I don’t like bugs,” she admitted. “I like butterflies.”
When she found a woolly-bear caterpillar in the woods near Bulrush Slough, she flipped through the book and turned immediately to page 89, which offered a detailed description of the insect, which is the larva of the Isabella tiger moth (Pyrrharctia isabella). It had a wide brown band in the middle, which someone said could be a sign of a long winter.
Not so fast. According to the “Peterson” guide, read by Nazirah, “the woolly bear is mistakenly thought by some to predict the severity of the coming winter.”
Even better than the lesson in debunking a meteorology myth was the chance to mark off “Caterpillar” on her group’s Bingo card, she said. Already marked on the card: an ant, a cricket, a honeybee and a mosquito.
“What are we looking for next?” asked Carla Rosario, the group’s teaching assistant.
“A fly,” said Jamere Cornelious, 16, a junior at Humboldt.
“Let’s stop looking for bugs,” Nazirah responded. “Let’s start looking for turtles.”
The group continued walking through an oak savanna and a red-pine forest before arriving at Valley Creek, their turnaround spot.
‘Dream come true’
Andrea West, the deaf/hard of hearing teacher at Humboldt, led Wednesday’s field trip. She said the new space is a game changer for students with special needs.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Just to have this big building, logistically, is so great. We have tube feeding, we have toileting, we have wheelchairs. We’ve never had a big space like this for them to come experience it all together. It’s kind of a dream come true. The kids look like they’re good and tired, which is how we like to send them home to their parents.”
West said she hopes the larger space means the students can take even more field trips to Belwin this school year. “Hopefully, we can keep coming here again and again,” she said. “In the past, we’ve been able to come out, you know, two to three times a year. I’ve been a teacher here for 14 years, and I’ve come in minus-10 degree weather and in the pouring rain. We have fun no matter what.”
The $3.6 million Peter J. King Family Foundation Wetlands Center also expands Belwin’s capacity to provide immersive outdoor science education to more children in neighboring districts. Later this fall, elementary students from Stillwater Area Public Schools will begin coming to Belwin as part of their science curriculum, Bloome said.
Belwin officials are still working on raising the last $400,000 of a $10.2 million capital campaign for infrastructure projects that will “improve access and make Belwin more welcoming for people,” Bloome said. Additional funds raised will help pay for new paved trails that are accessible to the general public, she said.
Belwin also plans to improve its entrances with new signage and vegetation, she said. “Right now, you could drive by our parking lot for Stagecoach Prairie and not even know where it was,” she said. “We’re also planning internal directional signage, but then also entrances that are kind of designed to be welcoming with vegetation that cues you that, ‘Oh, this is where you’re supposed to be.’”
Renovations of Belwin’s Savanna Center buildings also are planned to make them into a program center, a rental space and an artist space, she said.
‘A first-class experience’
Before the new center opened, students with special needs at SPPS used an old portable classroom as their space at Belwin, Bloome said. “It was from the 1980s, and it was far beyond its lifespan,” she said. “We retrofitted it as best we could to fit the needs of all the special-education kids who come out here, but it really wasn’t meeting all of the needs.
“Part of the reason to build this new education center was to make sure that the kids in special education had a first-class experience when they come out here,” she said. “They should get a building that removes barriers for them. That makes them feel connected to the outside even when they’re inside, and they should have easy access to the trails they need to get to the wetlands and to the ecosystems.”
Bloome said all children benefit from spending time in nature.
“We all benefit from being outside,” she said. “There are physical health benefits, emotional and mental health benefits, but also academic benefits, too. There have been studies that have shown that academic outcomes improve with studies outdoors or with kids studying outdoors.”
It’s also important to look at the “bigger picture,” Bloome said.
“We need people to care about nature, right? So by making sure that kids experience nature, like wilderness-type nature, where it looks wild and messy, instead of a manicured city park, that’s a really important experience for them to have, so that they can then connect with it and, hopefully, value it as they grow and as they make decisions in their life.”
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