On April 15, 2001, approximately 70 students from the Montrose (Colorado) Centennial Junior High School took a field trip to the Piñon Hills Estates residential subdivision, a wildland/urban interface area located 20 minutes outside of the city of Montrose. The students' task for the day was to develop a fire mitigation plan for one of the homes in the subdivision. The owners of that home had been working with the Colorado State Forest Service (CSFS) district forester and the Montrose Interagency Fire Management Program (Bureau of Land Management/U.S. Forest Service) fire ecologist to complete just such a plan for their property, so they were very enthusiastic about having the students come onsite to help.

The objective of the project was for students to apply science, math, social management, and language arts within a natural context in order to engage them in the complex interrelationship between human and natural communities. To prepare the students for the field trip, a core team of teachers (in science, social studies, and language arts) at the Centennial Junior High School worked with the Montrose Interagency fire education specialist and fire ecologist, the CSFS district forester, and the Montrose County Sheriff's Department to conduct a series of five classes at the school. The classes were designed to: acquaint the students with the fundamentals of fuels and fire behavior; teach the basics of using maps and of determining land ownership; and introduce the concepts of "Firewise" mitigation planning and community emergency planning. In the course of taking the classes, the students completed a fire mitigation plan for their school to familiarize themselves with required plan components and help them understand the multiple levels of planning required within the wildland/urban interface.

Shortly after completing the classroom sessions, the students and teachers embarked on their field trip to Piñon Hills Estates. The students rotated among four onsite stations, where they conferred with Federal, State, and County fire and emergency managers to produce or gather information on: weather and topography; fuels and burning conditions; "Firewise" home protection; and emergency preparedness and evacuation procedures. Five volunteers from the local chapter of the American Red Cross were also onsite to help the students develop their plans, and the Montrose County Sheriff's Department also played a vital role. In addition, the students talked to the homeowners themselves to obtain additional information about the area and the property. The students then returned to the school and spent the remainder of the day working in teams to complete their fire mitigation plans. The students chose one of four public forums (a web page, a news article, a public presentation, or a school presentation) through which to report their findings; they presented their final projects during the week of May 6.

Montrose County Undersheriff Dick Deines teaches emergency evacuation to students as part of a social studies class.	Students use belt weather kits to take observations for incorporation into their fire mitigation plan.	Montrose Interagency Fire Management Program fuels technician Todd Richardson discusses weather as it relates to fire behavior.

This fire mitigation education project was funded by a grant from GreenWorks!, an environmental education and community action program of the American Forest Foundation's Project Learning Tree (PLT). PLT is an award-winning, international environmental education program that focuses on teaching kids how—not what—to think about complex environmental issues.

More recently, Centennial Junior High School students also participated with the Bureau of Land Management, the National Interagency Fire Center, and The Nature Conservancy in "Share the Adventure! Exploring Wildland Fire," a November 2002 live satellite broadcast. For more information about the students' participation, please visit BLM's "Share the Adventure!" website at http://www.blm.gov/education/LearningLandscapes/teachers/fieldtrip/colorado.html

For more information on the fire mitigation/fire education program in Montrose, please contact Maggie McCaffrey, Montrose Interagency Fire Education Specialist, at (970) 240-5396 or Maggie_McCaffrey@blm.gov.

*Please see http://www.firewise.org for information on the interagency National Wildfire Coordinating Group's Firewise program and educational resources. Please also visit the Prevention and Education website of the National Interagency Fire Center at http://www.nifc.gov/preved/index.html and BLM's Fire Education page for teachers at http://www.blm.gov/education/LearningLandscapes/teachers/fire.html for additional resources.

For more information on Project Learning Tree, please visit the program's website at http://www.plt.org.