Mark Pankau, a retired Loudoun County Public Schools teacher, was honored in February with the 2024 Page Hutchinson Environmental Educator of the Year award by the Virginia Association for Environmental Education. Pankau was a physical education teacher at Guilford Elementary School and retired in 2019.
During his time as an educator, he ran an after-school environmental club, helped jumpstart the school’s recycling efforts, and began the Northwest Virginia Regional GREENetwork newsletter. In 2022, he became the board chair of the Loudoun Environmental Education Alliance.
Pankau chatted with Northern Virginia Magazine about his environmental contributions and how local students have crafted their own sustainability projects.
When you first became involved as an environmental educator in 2007, what motivated you to start on this journey?
My professional background is in health and physical education, and my personal background, through both my maternal and paternal grandparents and further back, was farming. There was a natural genetic link.
The opportunity presented itself with an enrichment club at Guilford Elementary School. It started with a recycling club and gradually morphed into an environmental club. [It involved] transposing a courtyard into an outdoor classroom with grade-level vegetable garden beds and [a] native pollinator garden, herbs, a sensory garden, shade gardens, and all sorts of opportunities for teachers to take their students outside to teach all core curriculum subjects. Math can be taught in the outdoors, language arts can be taught outdoors, and so on.
Why is it important to start environmental education young?
Most of us adults never had environmental education when we were in school. We were never exposed to it unless we came from a rural background or had a personal interest in the outdoors. Moving forward, technology shows up, and everyone wanted to be inside. The pandemic happened, and everyone had to be inside.
Now, in education, there’s a struggle to catch students up for the two years they lost. This poses a golden opportunity to help kids de-stress, get outside, get some fresh air — as well as the teachers, who were under tremendous stress in their jobs.
What have been some of the highlights you’ve seen students achieve with environmental education projects?
Being a former elementary teacher, everything the students did was amazing, because most everything excited them. We had to raise our funds at Guilford to do things like a Mother’s Day plant sale. That helped raise seed and soil money to start more plants and sell them in little plastic four-pack and six-pack containers.
As you move into middle school and high school projects, they get more scientific. To see the breadth and scope, the details, the research that goes into these projects is incredible. One in particular that I’ll mention is that when we started the Loudoun Student Environmental Action Showcase in 2019, one of the high school students had already started her own company. It’s called Nest4Us.
Her name is Shreyaa Venkat. She is now the CEO and president of a global organization that covers everything from food shortages, to giving, to sustainability, to the environment. She and her younger sister have started this organization.
If you visit their website, nest4us.org, you can see the number of awards, recognitions, their sitting on the United Nations [on] various councils, and their work with U.S. presidents. [Venkat is] still an undergraduate student in college. I’ve just nominated her for the North American Association for Environmental Education 30 under 30 award.
What are some challenges of environmental education that you hope get addressed or resolved moving forward?
In Loudoun County, we have our new superintendent, Dr. Aaron Spence, who came to us from Virginia Beach with a very strong environmental education program. Around the same time, [there was] the hiring of the first-ever director of sustainability, Clark Seipt. She has a wonderful background and has hit the ground running, attending national conferences [and] participating in our recent state conference. Gem Bingol is with the Piedmont Environmental Council, and a former officer of [Loudoun Environmental Education Alliance], and they are addressing countywide sustainability needs.
All of this is now beginning to come together — education, government, for-profit and nonprofit [organizations], corporations, and industry — to benefit the umbrella of sustainability in our own backyard.
Feature image courtesy Loudoun County Public Schools
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