Mary Jordan
Springdale Public Schools
The region’s monarch butterfly population has declined upwards of 90% in recent decades, a concern Smith Elementary School students are helping to address through a unique outdoor learning space.
“The gardens provide color and beauty to a school landscape and a haven for many types of butterflies, insects, birds, squirrels, rabbits and small animals for them to discover and enjoy,” said Smith Elementary teacher Brittney Taylor of her first-grade students. “It's a calm place to write, draw and read.”
First-grader Zara Warden, 7, said she loves learning in the garden.
“It has a lot of different types of flowers, and usually there's a lot of butterflies there,” Zara said.
Students learn about environmental stewardship by watering and caring for the plants and feeding the fish, Taylor said. Conversations about monarch butterfly conservation were a significant part of such student learning this school year.
The monarch's decline is a worldwide concern, according to The Nature Conservatory, a global environmental nonprofit.
As pollinators, the monarch's annual migrations span thousands of miles and provide an essential service for many ecosystems to thrive, according to the conservatory. It's due to pollinators, such as butterflies and bees, that the world has many of the flowers and food it replies upon.
Arkansas is part of the spring breeding grounds for monarchs as they migrate north to Canada from their overwintering grounds in Mexico, according to the Arkansas Monarch Conservation Partnership, the nation's largest nonprofit dedicated to upland habitat conservation. The two-way migration stretches up to 3,000 miles.
Monarchs are threatened by widespread habitat loss, increased use of pesticides and climate change, according to the partnership. The decline is also linked to a decrease in milkweed, the butterfly’s only caterpillar host plant. Monarchs can’t complete their life cycle without milkweed, causing populations to plummet.
Smith’s outdoor classroom includes an expansive botanical garden, complete with walking paths, a coy pond, an amphitheater and butterfly and memorial gardens.
“First-grade curriculum focuses on life cycles of butterflies, frogs, plants and the four seasons, which we can teach by walking out into our nature garden,” Taylor said.
Students love to discover and identify caterpillars and their host plants and to put the insects into butterfly tower habitats to develop, she said.
“They then watch these caterpillars turn into chrysalises, and later, they excitedly release butterflies back into nature,” Taylor said.
First-grader Bradley Alvarado, 7, said the entire process takes time, to include when a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis.
“If it happens really quickly and they don't dry their wings, they might not fly because their wings might be too wet,” Bradley said.
Students likewise each grew milkweed to take home as Mother’s Day gifts and to contribute to rebuilding the monarch’s ecosystem and population in their home gardens, Taylor said.
Older grade levels may explore the gardens on their own, using signage for self-guided tours, said Susan Jones, who taught first grade at Smith for 35 years prior to retiring in 2021. The school’s pre-K through fifth-grade teachers can also create curriculum-based scavenger hunts and grade-specific lessons to help all of Smith’s students get the most out of the outdoor classroom.
Development of the outdoor learning space is continuous and began in 1996, Jones said. It’s one of the largest outdoor classrooms in Arkansas with a 15,000-square-foot teaching space featuring more than 100 species of plants, trees, shrubs and flowers.
Classroom growth has been funded through about $52,000 in grants, some $50,000 in personal donations, as well as in-kind community partner donations, Jones said. School staff, students and volunteers, such as Jones, maintain the gardens throughout the year.
“The outdoor classroom is truly my happy place. I've enjoyed designing and building it throughout the years, and spending time with children has been a joy,” Jones said. “I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have had the friends, principals, teachers and students who have lent me a helping hand throughout the years.”
