By Edward Quedado

When she testified before the Lake County Board of Commissioners weeks ago, nothing was assured to Marci Schreder.

The watershed coordinator for the Lake County Watershed Council stated her case for the commissioners to allocate a little more than $8,000 from the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act to fund, in essence, an educational excursion for high school students.

“The future for funding is very uncertain,” Schreder said after her appearance at the public hearing. “We’re a non-profit, the Lake County Watershed Council, so everything is grant based. Everything we do is unknown for sure until you have a grant agreement.”

The continuation of the program, Schreder said, was contingent on receiving funding from the commissioners.

Weeks later, the commissioners put Schreder’s concerns to rest, agreeing to fund the expenditure pending funding rules pertaining to SRSCA. In finalized, the money will fund the camp for another two years.

SRSCA funding to Lake County as with all forest-laden counties in the county, have operated under a certain degree of uncertainty with reauthorization being no guarantee. One of the consequences trickles down, however, to groups like the Lake County Watershed Council where programs like their natural resource camp provide a different dimension of education, experimental education, to potentially future scientists and policy makers.

The camp coalesces students from all over the county, bringing kids from Lakeview High School, Paisley High School and North Lake High School and combines them alongside experts from agencies and disciplines including forestry, watershed management, biology and wildlife.

“This year we are hoping to open it up to anyone who is interested in a back county experience or the natural resource element of it,” Schreder said.

In the past, as is the plan this year, the students headed to Willow Springs Guest Ranch, owned by Keith and Patty Barnhart.

After arriving at the ranch, the students hiked miles into a more remote area where sheep-herders tents were setup.

The students were then split up and lectured by such experts as Pete Schreder on rangeland health and Craig Foster with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The camp is only two-days long but even for students whose careers did not end up taking them into natural resource management or a branching discipline, they found significant value in the camp.

Megan O’Leary, a former student at Paisley High School who attended the camp in 2007, said she found crucial value in the fact the she was able to learn outside of the classroom and tangibly feel what her imagination could previously only interpret through a book. Her immediate future will see her start nursing school at Montana State University but for her immediate background, a girl who grew up on a ranch, the camp supplemented her knowledge of the lifestyle she grew up with.

“I still work on my family’s ranch and I’m still very passionate about agriculture and ranching; it’s not my career but it’s still my lifestyle,” O’Leary said. “For me, some of the things they were telling me about I was familiar with but other I was not familiar with like the weeds (education). Those were things I could apply on our ranch.”

The culmination of the trip for students on the trip was to come up with a comprehensive management plan that addressed all aspects of the environment.

“I thought that was a really good experience because you couldn’t just think about yourself or your primary interest. You had to compromise to come up with things that the whole group could agree on,” O’Leary said. “That was definitely an experience that could be applied in the real world.”

Schreder said she has always valued the sort of education that provides hands-on experience. Providing it to students, thus, gave her the impetus to implement the camp.

“We really started trying to think of a way to get kids incorporated in aback country place where they could get involved with the resources around them and how important it is to link our resources together,” Schreder said.

“I would like to see it continue; learning in the classroom is so monotonous. It was a fun trip to be able to get out of the class and do things with noxious weeds and wildlife management. They can beat it into your head,” O’Leary said.

O’Leary, as with her fellow students on the trip, may never end up living a life so involved with nature but she insisted no matter the path any student takes, the value of the camp, for the hands-on experience it provides and for its social component, is something to take home.

“It’s something different to actually get a firsthand experience. With noxious weeds for example, that is something that even a lot of ranchers here don’t know about. They’re getting more educated on it but people still don’t know a lot about it. It’s s good thing to educate people in high school so when they graduate. They may have a better handle on it. They didn’t just bring in anyone of the street.

“They really brought in the specialist in each area to talk about it so we were getting the best information firsthand.”

Published August 18, 2010 in the Lake County Examiner