California State Parks launched Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students (PORTS) in 2004. The Año Nuevo elephant seal program is one of their flagships. Back then, PORTS fed live video from a camera set up on Año Nuevo Island to a green screen studio at Seacliff State Beach, where a parks interpreter appeared amongst the elephant seals to teach students in faraway classrooms about California’s geography and natural history.
In the past two decades, PORTS has blossomed into a multi-faceted virtual learning platform serving an estimated 350,000 students annually. They organize thousands of live interactive presentations, broadcasts and blended-access field trips at no cost to teachers and students.
The goal is simple: introduce kids to California State Parks. California has approximately 6 million public school students. State parks encompass over 1.5 million acres of land, from lush redwood forests in the north to scrubby arid deserts farther south.
“The 600,000 kids that are in Los Angeles Unified School District are never going to take a field trip to a Redwood Park,” said PORTS Program Director Brad Krey, “So how can we bring redwoods to them?”
A PORTAL TO THE FUTURE
“It’s basically just a Zoom call,” Krey said. “But we have people in parks instead of in a board room or an office.” PORTS outfits staff in the field with equipment to deliver live lessons on natural phenomena to classrooms statewide.
In a PORTS on-demand program, the interpreter calls into a classroom and engages directly with the students. These slots are limited and highly sought after. In January, PORTS registered 2,200 presentations overnight when they posted their spring programming, with topics ranging from a history of the Donner Party to salt marshes and climate change.
Some National Parks, museums, aquariums and zoos have online learning tools but there are no other programs that rival PORTS in scale and content diversity.
People often think of distance learning as a legacy of the COVID pandemic, but State Parks have been refining their approach for years. “We started this program before Skype existed, before the iPad existed before mobile phones had cameras,” said Krey. They even contracted with Zoom before Zoom became synonymous with video conferencing.
Krey remembers waltzing into the CEO’s San Jose office and showing him what they proposed doing with video technology. “He was like, oh my god, how can I help you?”
When COVID forced schools to close, PORTS was ready. Krey describes it as an evolutionary event in the program’s history. They had hundreds of events scheduled for Spring 2020, but instead of canceling the programs, they asked Zoom to turn on the webinar feature and transition them to broadcast.
Within a week, PORTS had 1,000 people on a Zoom call with an interpreter on a kayak in Point Lobos State Park, learning about kelp forests and conservation. Webinar-style PORTScasts are now a program staple, streaming daily with as many as 400 classrooms tuning in.
ALTERNATIVE TRANSPORTATION
Amanda Nichols teaches fifth grade at Sherwood Elementary School in Salinas. Last year, during the 2022-2023 school year, she brought her students to Point Lobos after a virtual field trip in the kelp forest from the kayak. This year, they went to Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove, both sponsored by PORTS.
Asilomar is only half an hour away from Sherwood, but for several students in Nichols’ class, this was their first trip to the beach. “It’s definitely one of our priorities, and for me, it’s a privilege to get to take them to these places they haven’t seen yet,” said Nichols.
Even months after the trip, the student’s faces lit up when Nichols asked them about Asilomar. “These experiences are most likely going to last a lifetime,” said Nichols. The blended access program, aka PassPORTS, pairs virtual learning with an in-person visit. According to Nichols, it would be difficult for them to pull off field trips at this scale without help from PORTS. Sherwood Elementary has over 900 students. Traveling even half an hour with 100 fifth graders is no small task.
Although an in-person visit is icing on the cake, something as simple as a live Q&A goes a long way. “You just never know what will spark their interest,” Nichols said. “Even just hearing their name on the video, that’s super cool.”
The limitations Sherwood students face are not unique. Field trips to State Parks are not as common as they once were and many families don’t have the resources to organize trips outside of school. In a state as large as California, even the well travelled are unlikely to see as much of the state as PORTS can show them.
“I can’t stress enough how appreciative we are for this program,” Nichols said. “I know our kids feel the same way.”
AN IMPORTANT JOB
State Parks interpreter Leslie Reyes now leads the famous Año Nuevo elephant seal program. She starts every session by asking how many students in the class have been to the beach. “I met with a fourth grade class in Los Angeles,” Reyes said, “and I just assumed that every kid had been to the beach,” but the teacher stopped her and asked her students to raise their hands if they’d touched sand before. The classroom was split.
Reyes describes what it feels like to be there, presenting. She creates connections between the elephant seals and the students, describing how they cover themselves in sand to protect against sunburn and use their whiskers to find food in the same way a plucked guitar string makes music.
“We’re not that much different,” she said, “we have things in common with these animals.”
Reyes likes to ask the students to be quiet for a moment and observe the elephant seals. They watch as the camera pans across males locked in combat, seal pups nursing and juveniles socializing at the fringes.
“I think it’s important to expose kids to many different habitats, and nature in general,” Reyes said, “so that they can see that they’re part of a bigger picture in life.”
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