Seeing a dolphin splash off the Gulf Coast for the first time. Standing on the site where, at dawn one morning in 1864, the U.S. Army brutally attacked a camp of Native American civilians in southeastern Colorado. Facing the bank of a river that’s being washed away due to erosion.
“Actually going there and seeing what it’s like, getting that 360-degree view, you can’t replicate that,” said Anton Schulzki, a retired history teacher in the Colorado Springs school district 11, where for years, students who took a course on the American West would visit the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site as part of a field trip.
Now, though, a notice on the landmark’s website says its visitor and education center in Eads, Colo., is closed until further notice. An employee who answered the phone at the national historic site in Colorado said the center would likely remain closed due to budget and staff challenges.
These staffing challenges aren’t new. In recent years, the National Park Services has struggled with too few employees and limited financial resources. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of full-time employees of the NPS fell by an estimated 3,400, or 15 percent, while visitors to national parks increased to a record number 312 million visitors in 2022, according to data collected by the National Park Services.
But since February, national parks and other federally funded agencies have been hit with extreme and sudden cuts to their workforce and budgets. The Trump administration in February fired around 1,000 probationary employees from the National Park Services. Park rangers who staff visitor centers and run school programs were among the personnel most affected, according to the Association of National Park Rangers.
A federal judge in March ruled that the park service could reinstate those workers, but this week, the Supreme Court halted the lower court order. As litigation continues, the future of the national park workforce remains uncertain.
Also earlier this month, an estimated two-thirds of employees at the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that funds arts, culture, and history programming across the country, were placed on administrative leave, and more than 1,000 of their grants were canceled.
These actions are part of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to significantly reduce the size of the federal government workforce in general and, specifically, agencies that, according to the president, “divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
Schools will likely feel the pain of these cuts, which could curtail access to experiential learning—from grants for hands-on professional learning opportunities taught by living historians, to programs that expose students from low-income neighborhoods to natural ecosystems, to other real-world lessons that can’t be replicated in a school classroom.
Reaching students through ‘place-based’ experiential learning
It’s these real-world experiences that resonate with many students, especially those who may struggle to make connections in the classroom or who otherwise don’t have access to experiential learning opportunities, educators say.
“How do you get those students involved? A lot of times it’s that hands-on, outside-the-classroom, in-the-real-world experiences,” said Schulzki, who is now the interim executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies.
Field trips also fit the “inquiry-based” model of teaching: “Being able to go on a field trip to help generate more questions and seek more answers is part of what we do,” he said.
For some students, like those at the Title 1 K-8 school in central Louisiana where Peter Lacaze teaches, a school field trip may be their only opportunity to experience these real-time ‘aha’ moments.
Many of Lacaze’s 8th graders have never been to the Louisiana coast, about a four- to five-hour drive away. Most, said Lacaze, have never spent the night in another town. It took some convincing to get them to make the overnight trip to the W. J. DeFelice Marine Center, the main facility of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, or LUMCON, in Cocodrie.
But ultimately, the students had no regrets about making the trek, he said.
“They experience this stuff for the first time,” Lacaze said. “You have these 8th graders asking, ‘What kind of bird is that?’ or, ‘Do you see that shark?’—that’s actually a dolphin. It opens them up to a world that they typically wouldn’t be involved with.”
Leading up to the trip, the students learned about the environmental challenges facing the Louisiana coast, like erosion and wetland habitat loss and how they affect Louisiana.
“When we go down there, it’s the accumulation of what we’re working on, and we go see the impact for ourselves,” said Lacaze.
Once on site, students hear from biologists firsthand about what’s happening on Louisiana’s coast. They look in microscopes, go out to the field, and take a boat out into the Gulf.
“They said it was the best field trip they’d ever taken,” Lacaze said.
Field trips to federally funded sites could be in peril
Some 4,000 to 5,000 K-12 students, mostly from Louisiana, annually take field trips to the research and educational facilities of LUMCON, a program of the Louisiana Board of Regents whose consortium of 32 postsecondary institutions promotes and conduct research and education collaborations.
“Since the mid-80s, K-12 education has been part of our mission,” said Brian Roberts, LUMCON’s executive director and chief scientist. “Place-based experiential learning is something that can be life-changing.”
Until recently, Roberts expected the number of visits from K-12 students to grow, as LUMCON recently added a second educational facility, the Houma Maritime Campus. But federal budget cuts make him wary of the organization’s future.
“As an organization, we are heavily reliant upon federal dollars,” said Roberts. “And there are a lot of unknowns about how changes at the federal funding level are going to directly impact states.”
Normally, LUMCON sees more demand than it has space to accommodate. This season, though, some school groups have canceled; Roberts suspects funding could be why.
“I think we’re seeing some contraction, but I anticipate much more moving forward,” he said. “If schools have money in hand right now, many of them are able to spend it. The question is whether they’ll get their next year’s allotment or whether there will be future funding opportunities for them. I think you’re going to see a much bigger impact in the coming year.”
Professional learning workshops tied to experiential learning also in jeopardy
A weeklong summer workshop at LUMCON that Lacaze took about 10 years ago ignited his passion for Louisiana coastal issues, he said. Since then, he’s wanted to share what he’s learned there with his students.
Lacaze’s experience is not unusual. Hands-on professional development can expose teachers to ideas for student field trips that they otherwise may not consider.
Many such PD experiences are made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The federal agency got news this month of significant budget cuts that canceled an estimated 1,200 grants and placed about 80 percent of the agency’s staff on administrative leave.
The budget cuts have left places like Heart Mountain, a World War II Japanese American confinement site in Park County, Wyo., in a precarious position.
Normally, Heart Mountain in the summer welcomes teachers for a two-week professional learning experience where they learn firsthand about the history of Japanese American incarceration from a group of experts, including people who were formerly incarcerated in the camps. This spring, the foundation that supports Heart Mountain applied for a NEH grant, Landmarks of American History and Culture, to support workshops in summer 2026.
Then, cuts to the endowment’s budget were announced, leaving the future of this professional development program in jeopardy.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty. We’re planning for the worst and hoping for the best,” said Ray Locker, spokesperson for the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. “We’re not optimistic. We usually find out if we receive the Landmarks of American History and Culture grants in late July or early August [for the following summer], but we don’t know if anyone is still there to review the applications.”
