At the height of the environmental movement, Springfield, Mass., public school teachers Lorraine Ide and Clifford A. Phaneuf set a goal of helping young students to understand and appreciate their role in nature. In collaboration with the city's parks department and schools, Ide and Phaneuf opened the Environmental Center for Our Schools (ECOS) in 1970. Intended for elementary and middle school students in the city, ECOS enables students and teachers to expand their knowledge of the natural world by exploring the diverse habitats of Forest Park. The program was designed for immersive, hands-on discovery: students participate in outdoor activities, study nature, and learn the survival needs of all living things.
The ECOS records consist of materials from the planning and early years of the organization, including Title III information, curricula, evaluations, copies of tests, teaching guides, and other educational materials, publications, reports, meeting agendas, and conference materials.
Background on Environmental Center for Our Schools
ECOS logo
Clifford A. Phaneuf, a teacher at Myrtle Street School in the Indian Orchard neighborhood of Springfield, Mass., had a farm in Brimfield where he took some of his students for summer nature activities. In 1969, when Phaneuf became a team leader in the National Teacher Corps, the environmental movement was at its height. Active in the Springfield public school district's science department, Phaneuf joined with elementary science head Lorraine Ide to begin a pilot program on environmental education based in the city's 735-acre Forest Park. Environmental Center for Our Schools (ECOS) opened in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, at the former Camp Seco grounds. Phaneuf enlisted some Teacher Corps interns as the first ECOS teachers, and the students came from Springfield elementary and middle schools for immersive study of their natural environment and the diverse ecosystems of the park. Soon the program moved to the park's Porter Lake Skate House, which was renamed the Clifford A. Phaneuf Environmental Center and underwent extensive renovation in 2015-2016.
Phaneuf directed ECOS for seventeen years. Born in 1923, and hailed as a visionary in environmental education and urban environmentalism who instilled an appreciation for nature in many students, he died in 1988. Some 200,000 children from Springfield's public, charter, and private schools have gone through ECOS, learning about field, forest, and pond habitats, animal life cycles and adaptation, erosion, winter survival, and how to use a map and a compass.
Scope of collection
The ECOS records consist of materials from the planning and early years of the organization, including information supplied under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Supplementary Educational Centers and Services), curricula, evaluations, copies of tests, teaching guides, and other educational materials, publications, reports, meeting agendas, and conference materials.
Inventory
Administration: Conference Twenty-First Annual Meeting of The Canadian Association of
Geographers Speech Copy
Cite as: Environmental Center for Our Schools Records (MS 919). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
