El Dorado Community Foundation donors primarily support the local nonprofit community with their charitable giving. Sometimes, however, our donors will request grants be made to organizations outside of the local area. This can happen because a donor has a connection with that organization, or with its mission, or for any number of other reasons. Once in a while, we like to highlight the work of one of those nonprofits to showcase what makes them special to one of our local donors.
Bend Science Station is one such nonprofit. Located in Bend, Oregon, Bend Science Station’s mission is to provide high-quality, laboratory-based science education to students and their teachers in Central Oregon. Through this education, they open minds and open doors, empowering young scientists to change lives, including their own. By engaging students with tools, technologies, and the freedom to ask and answer their own questions, students are making discoveries not possible in the regular classroom and learning that science is a way to answer questions for the rest of their lives.
Bend Science Station was founded in 2002 with the idea to provide lab-based science instruction with a focus on kids developing skills they could use to become their own independent researchers. Originally the founders of Bend Science Station, Lisa & David Bermudez, planned their programs to be available after school, on weekends, and during the summer. However, it quickly became apparent that all of the local public schools wanted to be able to bring their students to the lab during the school day and utilize the hands-on approach to science provided by the staff of Bend Science Station. Now, 20 years later, the science labs are a regular field trip destination for over 7,000 public, private, and homeschooled students of all ages each year. The critical benefit this structure provides varies at different grade levels as well. Elementary schools benefit from labs at the Science Station that they wouldn’t have access to in the classroom, middle schools have access to their own labs but lack the funding and equipment to run proper experiments, and high schools benefit by their students having access to instructors that can support their independent research that their teachers can’t support due to class size.
The staff of Bend Science Station has a passion for science and a way of making science not only fun, but also relatable for children of all ages. One of the many ways the staff make science fun and relatable, especially for the younger kids, is by tying it in with popular culture. The most popular of these programs is a Harry Potter themed summer camp called Hogwarts Academy that explores the magic of science through a medium that every kid knows. This summer camp consists of a day of herbology, a day of potions, a day of magical creatures, and a day of the physics of Quidditch, all tied together with chemistry, biology, botany, and other schools of science. This popular summer camp keeps kids coming back year after year and helps instill a love of science and the natural world at an early age.
In addition to the over 7,000 students they serve, Bend Science Station also runs a program for local teachers to receive training and equipment to take back to their classrooms, allowing them the resources needed to teach science effectively. Bend Science Station has developed extensive curriculum for this program and have built a comprehensive lending library of technology, software, and equipment that teachers can check out and take back to the classroom to aid in their instruction. This program is especially beneficial for some of the more rural schools in underserved areas with very little in the way of resources to serve their student populations who often come from lower income families.
Bend Science Station owns their own building on the OSU Cascades campus that they were able to make a reality through a very successful capital campaign and through the incredible support of OSU’s invitation to build on their campus. Being located on a college campus has proven to be nothing short of amazing for Bend Science Station, not least of which because it gives visiting students a glimpse of what they could strive for in the future and a sense of awe at the reality of being in a place of higher education. With many of the students they serve coming from underserved and underprivileged communities, a day spent discovering the wonders of science on a college campus can change the trajectory of their lives.
One of the underserved populations that Bend Science Station has recently developed a program for is the Latino youth population. The new Mi Ciencia program serves specifically 3rd-8th grade Latino youth and is rapidly becoming very popular.
At the start of the pandemic, Bend Science Station found that they were not able to conduct business as usual as they could not bring students through the facility as normal. Since they couldn’t bring the kids to the science temporarily, they decided to send the science to the kids by creating a k-5 continuum of curriculum aligned with the current curriculum for some of the local schools. Curriculum included science kits, videos, and slide decks all for each grade level. This proved to be a lot more work than business as usual but the reward of making sure students learning remotely could still get a quality science education made it completely worth the extra work.
Now, as things begin to return to normal, Lisa and David are looking forward to getting kids back into the labs and moving forward with exciting new programs like Mi Ciencia. Their goals for the next year are simply to get back to doing what they are passionate about, bringing in-person science education and learning opportunities to the over 7,000 students that they serve each year.
The work of Bend Science Station is so valuable to the communities they serve, bringing a passion for science and education that benefits both students and teachers alike. This year Bend Science Station will be celebrating their 20-year anniversary and they are looking forward to the next 20 years of building upon the foundation they have developed already. Learn more about Bend Science Station by visiting their website at https://bendsciencestation.org.
