Indian River County sits nestled along Florida’s Treasure Coast with 100,000 acres of conservation land and (almost) no high rises. The county has been especially favored with spectacular natural resources including its beaches, the Jungle Trail, Sebastian Inlet State Park, McKee Botanical Garden, and the headwaters of the 310-mile-long St. Johns River, the longest river in the state of Florida, in Blue Cypress Lake near rural Fellsmere.
Indian River County has also been blessed with a lagoon, one of the most diverse estuaries in the northern hemisphere, 156 miles long, part of a system of three lagoons: the Mosquito Lagoon, which begins at Merritt Island and extends north into Volusia County; the Banana River, which runs between Merritt Island and Cape Canaveral; and the Indian River Lagoon, which extends into Palm Beach County. While the lagoon demands care, it holds its own economically, providing Florida with over $7 billion annually through ecotourism, the marine industry, defense, and aerospace.
The Indian River Lagoon doesn’t have monster sightings like the 21-mile Lake Worth Lagoon’s muck monster, mentioned a few years back on Late Night with David Letterman and the History Channel. What the Indian River Lagoon does have, however, are 4,300 species of plants and animals, including bioluminescent dinoflagellates flickering in the water, visible on a nighttime summer kayak tour.
During the glacial periods, the area was dry grasslands, but when the sea rose, water gathered and remained, forming the lagoon. Today, its grasses, such as black rush and cord grasses, sway underwater. The early Spanish explorers called the lagoon Rio de Ais, after the Ais Indian tribe who lived on its banks and depended on it as a source of sustenance, including its abundant shellfish, the consumption of which resulted in mounds of ancient detritus still found along the Indian River’s banks and once used to pave roads.
Averaging just 4 feet in depth, this shallow body of coastal water serves not only as a spawning ground and nursery for fish and shellfish, but as a habitat for all sorts of wildlife, including the brown pelican, the Atlantic salt marsh snake, the bottlenose dolphin, and the long-legged roseate spoonbill with a body shaped like a football. Meadows of turtle grass, originally evolved on land and then retreating into the depths of the lagoon where it flowers underwater, provide the feeding grounds for the green turtle and manatee, the state’s marine mammal. Nearly one-third of the nation’s manatee population inhabits the lagoon or migrates through its confines.
Because of the delicacy of the lagoon’s ecosystem, pressures to maintain the integrity of the waterway suffering from decades of algae blooms continue to mount as Florida’s population increases. The result is an urgent need to protect the lagoon’s mangrove wetlands and salt marshes, which filter runoff and protect the shorelines from erosion. Such concerns have led to regulations aimed at careless boaters, the excessive use of fertilizer, stormwater runoff from roadways, and sewage leaks from septic systems.
Dedicated to the lagoon’s protection, several agencies, both nonprofit and governmental, have adopted its stewardship. The nonprofit Indian Riverkeeper, which promotes citizen advocacy, is one; the governmental EPA and NEP, a national network of estuary programs, are others. Prominent among these watchdog organizations is the nonprofit Environmental Learning Center, located on a 64-acre Indian River Lagoon island accessed via the A.B. Michael Bridge (County Road 510). The island is a heavily wooded area with moisture dripping from the foliage and elevated wooden bridges that lead away from scattered buildings to the dock with its sweeping panorama of the lagoon. There, an anhinga spreads its wings to dry on the far bank and ospreys fly to tend their treetop nests, while a pontoon boat, filled with life-jacketed visitors and ready to begin its Eco-Tour, unhitches its moorings.
The ELC was founded in 1988 by a visionary group from the Pelican Island Audubon Society, including George Bunnell, Maggy Bowman, and Holly Dill—the first executive director of the ELC, who held that position for 25 years. The current executive director is Barbara Schlitt Ford, who has deep roots in the community, a strong interest in serving a broader demographic, and an appreciation for teamwork.
Ford confirms that the mission of the ELC is to educate and inspire people of all ages to be active stewards of the environment, in particular the lagoon. To that end, the ELC features educational programs and summer camps; an active beehive; butterfly-attracting gardens; hands-on exhibits, including a 145-gallon touch tank filled with tiny fiddler crabs and a live-in snail; and pontoon excursions to the St. Sebastian River, the Sebastian Inlet, the spoil islands for a splash tour, and Pelican Island, established in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt as the nation’s first national wildlife refuge.
As the lagoon is a nurturer of Florida wildlife, so it is for human young. Literacy on the Lagoon is an example of an educational program dedicated to improving the literacy of elementary school students who have completed the second grade, who know their letters and sounds but need an extra push to propel them into reading with ease. Funded for the last decade by The Learning Alliance along with generous donors, Literacy on the Lagoon is a well-conceived four-week summer offering led by the School District of Indian River County with the ELC as its supporting organization, which serves to develop activities around the county’s curriculum. The program’s facilitator, school district instructional specialist Elizabeth Barth, refers fondly to Literacy on the Lagoon as an “enrichment camp where you can actually observe, over a four-week period, young elementary school students becoming increasingly competent.”
The theory of using nature as a springboard to learning is not new. Seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke believed that children developed best when allowed to explore their natural world. Eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau concurred, adding that hands-on activity was the spur. Three hundred years later, Literacy on the Lagoon is a testimony to these early principles.
Last summer, 70 youngsters were invited to participate in the program through a letter to their parents. The letter specified that the program would be directed by five teachers from the School District of Indian River County, together with the ELC’s wildlife conservationist and senior environmental educator, Sara Piotter, in addition to 15 dedicated volunteers. Meeting Mondays and Fridays at the ELC from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., students—advised to wear sneakers with laces that tie—would be split into four groups to study firsthand the lagoon, its wildlife adaptation, animal classification and habitat, the water cycle, and changing patterns in nature.
Tuesdays to Thursdays, the students, 12 to 14 per class, would return to their classrooms at Liberty Magnet School from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. to process through writing and oral presentations what they had experienced. This would include the particular animal each student chose to study and the teacher-supported research that accompanied the selection.
At the conclusion of the season’s program, an evaluation would be made of each participant through three assessments: reading aloud, comprehension, and vocabulary, which includes such toney words as “biodiversity,” “classification,” and “brackish.” The annual follow-up findings, says Barth, have continued to show an across-the-board improvement in reading fluency.
Literacy on the Lagoon is also about imaginative expression. The program culminates in an hour-long performance to which parents are invited. Participants read their poetry and enact skits and plays for which they make their own costumes of recyclable materials such as cardboard and water bottles. A favorite yearly character is a hurricane. According to Barth, parents continue to praise the monthlong initiative, making such comments as, “Nothing like this has ever happened to my child.” Some youngsters who have attended the program have even gone on to become junior environmental volunteers at the ELC. It’s a win-win all around.
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