With Earth Day being celebrated this week, a discussion with the folks at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center brought to light a curious question: Where have all the children gone?

"The schools are not as supportive of getting kids outside in field trips as they have been in the past," said Susan Gallagher, chief naturalist at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center. "At least not here."While the Jim Thorpe Area School District has maintained its support of field trips to the CCEEC, one day per year from kindergarten through sixth grade, the center has not had recent visits from Lehighton or Palmerton schools. However, the center is attracting field trips from Luzerne and Hazleton school districts, and from home schooling groups.Gallagher believes that part of the reason is related to school budgets the costs of the program plus the costs of transportation, fuel, and substitute teachers for the kids who don't participate."Our understanding is that one of the first things to go on a school budget are field trips," she noted. "We are looked at as an expendable line item."Another reason is competition from the Lehigh Gap Nature Center, which is closer to Palmerton and Franklin elementary schools. The newer center, on the Lehigh County side of the border with Carbon County, is a Superfund site that began by revegetating the Blue Mountain, and has expanded to include school programs.Susan Howland, principal at Franklin and East Penn elementary schools, said that her third and fourth graders are going to the LGNC. She said that the overall cost is lower and the students enjoy the programs and the hiking trails.A third reason, one that Gallagher hopes is not happening, especially as we remember Earth Day, is that the schools may not be supporting getting kids outside in field trips."Some schools have tried having environmental learning areas on their own property, which is great," she said. "It's better if they visit the center. We have a lot of resources here, and if they come here we can really give them a full experience."We try to utilize hands-on activities where the children are actually doing something. Where they are not just sitting and listening. Where they are physically doing something: digging in the dirt, doing a stream study or looking in the water and catching crawfish. They're doing something to make that a full learning experience," said Gallagher."In every grade, we offer whatever topics teachers would like. Most of the time the younger students will have a broad-based topic. They may talk about animals and their young."The kids who were here this morning were learning about frogs and toads. They were learning about frog calls, and maybe now they can identify those frog calls when they go home tonight if there are any frogs in their backyard," said Gallagher."We get support from our Carbon County commissioners. In this current year, they have been very supportive. I think that they know and understand what we do and realize that we try to be an asset to the county residents and provide them with whatever public service we can."Gallagher was inspired by the first Earth Day in 1970."I graduated college in the mid-80s," she said. "I was probably the tail end of an environmental movement. I thought that energy would carry forward into years to come, and we would have many of our environmental problems solved by now. But that doesn't seem to have been the case."I see a lot of talk about things like alternative energy and green energy in the Green Revolution, and even from politicians who say that we as a nation need to be leaders in that arena, and yet they cut funding for environmental education. There is a disconnect there, because how can you be a leader in alternative energies or green energies on a world scale when you are not learning about these things in third grade?" Gallagher asked."That's where it starts. If you are not having those experiences, how can you tell what's wrong with an ecosystem, if you have never visited a healthy ecosystem? How can you see the difference?"I was one of those kids that was outside without shoes all summer long and spent a lot of time playing on the edges of town in the woods, something that we encourage parents to let the kids do today. We didn't use the word environment, we were environmental, and we didn't have these structured schedules. Sometimes you have to give kids the freedom."In the book 'Last Child in the Woods,' Richard Louvre coined the term 'nature deficit disorder.' He talks about that, if you grew up as a kid in the woods and you get together with your friends and you built a tree house, think of the lessons you learned building a tree house. We learned: about physics, engineering, we learned sociology because we had to decide who was going to do this and how is this going to work out. There were all these little life lessons that you got from unstructured nature play," said Gallagher.To help support the CCEEC, the Ukulele Institute is presenting a fundraising Spring Concert at the center at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 18. The center is located at 151 E. White Bear Drive in Summit Hill. Students and friends of the Ukulele Institute will be performing a diverse program of musical favorites featuring ukulele, guitar, singing and a few surprises.For information about CCEEC, visit

www.carboneec.org, or phone: (570) 645-8597.