Summit Discovery Trail Provides Early Learning Opportunity for Young Children in Grays Harbor

In Grays Harbor County, Washington, a collaborative effort between the Elma School District, Summit Pacific Medical Center, and Blue Zones Activate Grays Harbor County has transformed what was a simple walking path into an interactive classroom for young children and their families. One of the goals of the Summit Discovery Trail development was to help level the playing field for children who lack access to early learning services, which research has shown is crucial to academic and even lifelong success.

Trails like this may help equip young children with early learning essentials (such as the ability to count and recognize sight words) when they begin kindergarten. It also makes outdoor exploration fun, helping to foster a love for the outdoors and natural movement. Nearby communities are already viewing Grays Harbor’s Summit Discovery Trail as a model and have expressed interest in building similar learning trails.

Chris Nesmith, Superintendent of the Elma School District, is hopeful that the trail will have a positive impact on the youngest and most vulnerable students in the county. Both Nesmith and Chris Frye, Executive Director of the Blue Zones Activate initiative in Grays Harbor, played pivotal roles in bringing the trail project to fruition.

What are early learning services, and why are they important?

“One of the major issues we experience is that a lot of our students don’t receive early learning services,” said Nesmith. Early learning services could be anything from daycare to a home learning center to a structured preschool program. “But you’re receiving some sort of structured instruction around the four-year-old mark. And we know about 45% of our students are not receiving any early learning services,” Nesmith explained.

Based on the WaKIDS assessment given to students entering kindergarten for the first time in Washington state, this group of students starts school behind their peers in literacy and other skill areas in the Elma School District, according to Nesmith. They are near the bottom of the class in academic performance when compared to other students of the same age, including students from high poverty households, those with social/emotional issues, and those with learning disabilities.

“This population of students that are receiving no services is our second lowest performing population, and that’s kind of consistent,” he said. In fact, they are second only to students who have been diagnosed with specific learning disabilities.

Lack of access to childcare in Grays Harbor—where there’s a large Hispanic/Latino population and many low-income families—is a main reason that these students do not have early learning services when they start school, Nesmith said.

There are many factors that affect access to childcare, including a lack of childcare facilities, a shortage of childcare workers, and costs, according to The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2023 Kids Count Data Book, an annual publication that reports on state trends in child well-being.

“Access to early childhood education—preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds—is invaluable in preparing young learners for elementary school…” said the report. “Despite gains in recent years, our country is still failing to deliver early childhood education to more than half of its children (54%).”

When kids start off behind others, they may never catch up

Research shows that students who start school less prepared than their cohorts experience far-reaching negative impacts.

Attending a high-quality preschool before entering kindergarten, for example, is closely linked to both student and life success, and can help close the gap between children from low-income and children from wealthier families, according to a recent report by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI).

The report, designed to nudge policymakers to invest more heavily in preschool education, reviewed two separate research studies on the impact of preschool on students. They found that when participants in the studies were compared to students who didn’t attend preschool, the benefits of preschool were substantial and can follow a person throughout their lives.

“This is because people who attend preschool are more productive in school, work, and society generally—with higher levels of education and earnings, less involvement in delinquency and crime, and fewer chronic health problems,” W. Steven Barnett, Founder and Senior Co-Director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University ,was quoted in a press release about the LPI report.

“Even when students are only followed into elementary school, studies find significant benefits from preschool in lower rates of grade retention and special education, which offer a partial return on the investment. High-quality preschool programs can also help close the gap in school and life outcomes between those raised in low-income families and their wealthier peers,” Barnett said.

“Effectively, if you show up to kindergarten behind, then getting caught up is rare. I mean, you’re lucky if you just stay as far behind as you enter. Lots of schools are putting lots of money into special education services, resources, and intervention support on how to help students after they’re already behind,” Nesmith explained.

However, he said that passive learning is also very important for young children. This is the type of learning they might experience while visiting a zoo or taking a family vacation. For example, they might learn about sea turtles or the ocean while on a family vacation at the beach, but that’s only if the child’s family can afford to take a vacation. Inequities are prevalent when it comes to passive learning, in addition to access to more structured early learning opportunities, like preschool.

The Summit Discovery Trail was created to provide an opportunity for passive learning by all young children in the Grays Harbor community, but it is especially geared toward four- and five-year-olds, Nesmith said.

What is the Summit Discovery Trail?

This short interactive trail has 14 learning stations that combine academic and physical challenges, with QR codes that lead children to a website with additional resources and activities so they can continue learning from home. For example, a parent or sibling can scan the code on the trail at the word station, then go online and teach a child many additional sight words. The paired online activities are available in both English and Spanish, and the trail can be followed in either language, depending on which direction you walk.

“Parents or grandparents, or big brothers or sisters, could help the kids learn additional sight words on the website,” Frye said, explaining that another purpose of the trail is to help families connect and spend time together.

“One of our big takeaways is that you can go to the park 10 different times and have 10 different experiences, because every station has different layers,” he said.

An animal from the Pacific Northwest is also represented at each station, with the opportunity for children to go online and learn more about each. Different stations also offer children physical challenges and games that help them hone skills like letter and number recognition.

Many of the activities on the trail are closely linked to learning competencies for young children in the Elma School District. These competencies align with a printed learning resource that the school district developed called a “badge book,” which covers essential early learning skills that students need and that align with the WaKIDS assessment. These books are issued to district students in grades Pre-K through second grade.

The trail also teaches children and their families about the county region’s heritage and industries. For example, at one station, kids can learn about the life stages of salmon and about the local fishing industry, while another station teaches viewers about farming and agriculture in the area.

There is even a small library box at the trail site, filled with donated books that children are welcome to take home. Or, they can scan a QR code to access a curated list of books that can be checked out from the nearby Timberland Library. In the future, they will be able to reserve a book ahead of time from the trail.

Collaborating to bring the trail to life

Blue Zones has been working on the initiative to improve health and well-being in Grays Harbor County since February of 2023. The idea for the learning trail was sparked one day while Frye was meeting with Nesmith and several other community leaders at a local coffee shop. The group realized that the existing walking trail behind Summit Medical Center was being underutilized, and that the school district had some state funding available that it needed to use or lose. The idea was that the trail would also promote Blue Zones Power 9® principles, which include moving naturally more often, spending time with loved ones, and finding purpose.

“We’re ranked 36th out of 39 in the state’s health and wellness index, and we have an 85.6% free and reduced lunch rate, so we’re in a poor community that’s struggling,” Frye said. “So, we were sitting there asking, ‘How can we come up with some sort of way to keep our kids active while being able to learn?’” They decided to transform the existing trail into an interactive classroom that would tie in with the badge books being created for school students.

Once the initial plan was in place, Frye and his Blue Zones team helped guide everything from community partnerships to developing the companion website to expand the learning experience.

Many groups in the community helped to transform the trail. For example, the Cub Scouts came out and built bat boxes and birdhouses, while the PTA designed a music station. Frye said his own daughter, who is a junior at the University of Washington, worked on the trail’s meditation station aimed at reducing anxiety.

The trail location was ideal to target the families of children who lack access to early learning services. “The hospital is actually geographically between our two largest communities that do not receive special early learning services,” Nesmith said. “We mapped it out and identified where our students who are not receiving these services live, and we found that they live near the hospital.”

While interactive trails exist all around the country at parks, zoos, museums, and schools, Rachel Pincumbe, MPH, a project manager and community health expert for Blue Zones, said the Grays Harbor trail is extremely unique because it is specifically designed to “incorporate the school’s curriculum and educational components that students need to pass the curriculum at their school district.”

Since its ribbon cutting last fall, the Summit Discovery Trail has sparked interest from other communities in the area.

The nearby Chehalis tribe is currently looking at building a learning trail that teaches about their history, culture, hunting practices, and food, while the Hoquiam School District in Grays Harbor County is looking at replicating the concept to create their own learning trail.

“The Summit Discovery Trail aligns perfectly with our mission to promote healthy lifestyles,” Frye said. “We believe that integrating health and education in such a fun and innovative way will have a lasting impact on families in our community.”

Lisa Oliver Monroe is a journalist and author of a travel book about  America’s Historic Triangle (Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown). Her writing has been published by Virginia Living, Boomer Magazine, Kirkus Media, Advance for Nurses, and Colonial Williamsburg,  among many others.