Ausable Bayfield Conservation Educator, Denise Iszczuk, says this spring has brought them very close to pre-pandemic numbers as far as the number of students they've been able to reach.
Iszczuk says they had a very good mix of virtual and in-person teaching.
"We had a good mix of virtual and in-person, so this is still new to us, as we adjust and, yes, seeing more students in multiple different ways is pretty exciting and making a lot of school contacts and in the last six months we've almost seen nine-thousand students."
Iszczuk says virtual presentations allow them to reach out to students outside of the Ausable Bayfield watershed, so that's something they'd like to continue. She says March and April are not always great months to be outdoors, so the option of virtual presentations was really helpful.
"What we did in March was a bit of a river safety blitz and we saw almost 28-hundred students that way and in April, because it's Earth month, we thought, what better thing to do than to reach out virtually and get people thinking about field trips and getting outside."
Iszczuk says they're planning now for next year and hoping to take advantage, again, of the opportunities presented by virtual presentations.
