Educator of the Year — Rona Zollinger

Rona Zollinger, founder and director of the Environmental Studies Academy at the Briones School, is the Educator of the Year for 2010.

Zollinger started working in Martinez schools 11 years ago. Six years later, she decided to make Martinez her workplace and her home. “I remember thinking, what a cute town, I like this town. It has an historic nature and it’s right on the bank…I really like that my daughter can be in a community where people know each other.” 

Zollinger first started rethinking high school education while earning her teaching credential at San Diego State University.  She was frustrated with the state of education where she taught in San Diego. Classes were crowded and the curriculum did not seem to serve the student body there that spoke 40 languages. “I just felt like something was wrong in education, and I needed to do something to change it,” she said.

Not long after Zollinger started teaching in Martinez, she was offered a position in the Briones Independent Study Program, which allowed her to be a teacher and a student while she pursued a Ph.D. Before long, community members came to her with an idea for an Environmental Education program, which offered the opportunity for Zollinger to do something totally different with her students. The program would provide mentoring for her and her students as well as hands-on experience.

“I thought, wow, this is totally awesome. In my teacher training I never once was taught how you would integrate the curriculum into real life. This was so perfect. This was so much more what I wanted to do,” Zollinger said.

The program grew. Zollinger, her students and members of the community created the mission statement. The program received additional help from another program called Adopt a Watershed, that paid for summer training in place-based learning that involved the community and garnered their support.

“We knew we were doing something so different, that we had to demonstrate excellence,” Zollinger said of the project. “We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to represent the values of our mission statement and our vision statement. We want our students to be social agents of change who are committed to nurturing the community and the land towards a healthy and sustainable future.” 

Young Woman of the Year Coday Skinner is the first student to complete four years of high school with the Environmental Studies Program.