Environmental Charter School Could Be Coming to Germantown

School officials will consider an application to build a nature-based public charter school in Germantown next week.

A group of local parents, educators and natural resource professionals began developing plans for the Seneca Creek Charter School, which would serve students in grades kindergarten through eight, early last year. The Board of Education will hear details of the project as well as the proposed Crossway Community school in Kensington at its June 27 meeting and vote next month.

If approved, the projects would be the first charter schools in the county. Charter schools receive public funding in exchange for meeting certain accountability standards and are exempted from some rules. Students who choose to attend do not pay tuition.

“It’s a solid plan and we feel like it should go through,” said Krisna Becker of Clarksburg, a volunteer naturalist at Black Hill Regional Park in Boyds and one of the school’s founders.

Seneca Creek Charter School would use an environmentally focused curriculum developed by a partnership of several states, including Maryland, which recently awarded the project a $550,000 grant allocated to charter schools, Becker said. 
“It’s a hands-on approach to learning,” co-founder Adrienne Thompson of Germantown said. “All kids are natural environmentalists and they gravitate to the outdoors.”

The school’s guiding principles include creative problem solving, teaching across disciplines, individualized approaches to learning, an emphasis on service learning opportunities and field trips, and small class sizes.

“Studies show that adult environmental attitudes are shaped when kids are young and kids need to have meaningful experiences out in nature to really value it,” Becker said. “It’s a natural connection to so many subjects.”

Organizers were originally planning to start the school in a county-owned facility in Boyds but the renovations needed for the building were more costly than expected, Becker said. The group is now looking to lease an unnamed site in Germantown that has plenty of environmental features for children to explore, she said.

“We were looking for a place where kids can see what really belongs in a stream,” Becker said.