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Water is Life - January 2024
Water is Life
Inland Seas Education Association: Inspiring passion for the Great Lakes.
by Kathy Gibbons
“People protect what they love, they love what they understand and they understand what they are taught.”
Bruce Ross is almost evangelistic in his drive to give Detroit’s young people a chance to get to know their city’s namesake river. The Inland Seas Education Association (ISEA) coming to town and docking along the Detroit River for a few weeks annually over the last three years with its 77-foot, two-masted Inland Seas schooner has only fanned his zeal.
Setting up at the William G. Milliken State Park and Harbor downtown, Inland Seas offers half-day schoolship programs that give young people a chance to come aboard, take a sail on the river and conduct experiments. The organization has also offered excursions to give a select group of teens an opportunity to sail the ship between its home base in Suttons Bay and Detroit over the course of about five days.
“A lot of these kids rarely get out of their neighborhood,” Ross says. “And this experience of getting on a schooner and coming back home to Detroit and being part of a crew and working as a team, it was so important.
“We had a debriefing meeting with the kids and the one thing they said is, ‘I don’t believe I did this. Since I’ve done this, I can do anything I put my mind to,’” Ross continues.
All about the water
Founded as a nonprofit in 1989 to nurture curiosity, stewardship and passion for the Great Lakes in people of all ages, ISEA started out offering its schoolship programs aboard a chartered schooner out of Traverse City, Michigan. Local teachers would bring students to learn about Great Lakes ecology as they assumed the role of a scientist and assisted volunteer instructors with collecting and analyzing water samples while sailing for a few hours.
“The idea behind Inland Seas kind of started in the sense that under the theory of Jacques Cousteau, ‘People protect what they love,’” says Fred Sitkins, ISEA executive director. “The idea of a schoolship program is to educate youth in a way that helps them to develop a passion and care for the Great Lakes.
“That happens by positive associations, by a unique experience,” he continues. “That’s why we use these tall ship schooners — it’s a unique experience that puts students in a place where they’re more receptive to education and learning.”
During schoolship adventures, students may get to sail the ship, from helping handle sails to steering the boat. Programs are typically available to third through 12th-graders, though lower elementary programs are offered too.
They learn about things like invasive species, microplastics, water chemistry and fish. ISEA acquired its own schooner, Inland Seas, in 1994, with a dock for it built in 1996 in Suttons Bay, Michigan. That’s where the organization has been based since and where its Inland Seas Education Center is located. After that, it began offering three-day overnight STEM-themed (science, technology, engineering, math) adventures.
“These unique experiences connect individuals to the water,” Sitkins says. It’s also about opening young eyes to career possibilities. Many Inland Seas interns were once among schoolship program participants as children, with some going on to careers in a related science.
Maggie Oudsema did. She first came aboard Inland Seas as a high school student. “I was deciding between video production and biology, and being aboard Inland Seas basically sealed the deal that I wanted to be a biologist,” she says.
Oudsema returned to ISEA as a college intern for two seasons. “It helped me home in on the fact that there’s a bigger picture out there in regard not only to doing real science but also communicating to community members [to] look at these giant lakes you can’t even see the other side of — there’s things going on underneath the waves.”
What education should look like
Sitkins has had a long association with Inland Seas, actually working as a deckhand aboard the schooner the organization used to charter back in 1991-’92 before it acquired its own boat.
“I was a kid who didn’t like school,” he says. “As I watched this program happening over a couple of years, I thought, I wished education looked like this when I was a kid.”
That experience motivated Sitkins to earn a teaching degree, and he worked in public education for 20 years. When longtime Executive Director and Founder Tom Kelly retired in 2013, Sitkins took the helm.
“I’ve been glad to come back and serve the organization that gave me direction in my life,” he says.
He found that the organization had matured and grown.
“It was an established organization — they had a vessel of their own at that point and a really nice education facility here in Suttons Bay,” he says. “There had been quite a bit of expansion from when I was here before.”
The last 10 years
That momentum has only continued as demand for Inland Seas programs skyrocketed to the point that it was having to turn more people away than it was able to serve, Sitkins says.
“The difference in the organization over these last 10 years is that we really set out on kind of a Great Lakes-wide approach in wanting to spread beyond the Suttons Bay region, and a big portion of that desire is that there are so many underserved regions around the Great Lakes,” he explains. That led to outreach programs in Detroit, Chicago and rural Lake Superior areas.
Cyd Archer, vice president of the Chicago Yacht Club Foundation, says ISEA designed a STEM-themed program that sends up to 10 Chicago high school girls at a time on a working tall ship excursion. Girls must write an essay about overcoming challenges in their lives to qualify and are recruited from what Archer described as underserved populations.
At first, the young women traveled on the boat from Detroit to Suttons Bay. Then the foundation transported the participants to Suttons Bay so they could sail the ship back home.
“Many times these girls have never been away from home,” Archer says. “[ISEA] teaches them how to sail the boat. They teach them leadership skills. They teach them to eat better — there’s a cook onboard. They do experiments. They have to sit watch at night, and can see the stars and Northern Lights, which they can’t see in Chicago because of all the ambient city lights.”
Upon docking back in Chicago, the schooner stayed for about 10 days to conduct half-day STEM cruises for Chicago-area middle schoolers.
“We’re just trying to get kids on the water… to see the possibilities out there for careers and life experiences they might not have known about,” Archer says.
To help accommodate the growing demand, ISEA launched a $1 million fundraising campaign that enabled the purchase of a second schooner, the three-masted Alliance. It arrived in Traverse City in 2023 and has been undergoing a retrofit to make it more functional for overnight journeys in 2024.
“The Alliance is going to come close to doubling our capacity,” Sitkins says. “In a typical year, we’re in the 5,000- to 6,000-student mark. We anticipate it will be more along the lines of 10,000 participants with the addition of Alliance.”
Groups that come share a portion of the cost to participate. ISEA is mostly donor-funded through foundations and individuals, with grant money also available. For example, a class of 30 might pay about one-third of the actual cost of a schoolship program, with ISEA subsidizing the rest.
With a full-time staff of 11 and seasonal staff to help crew the ships and intern as summer educators, ISEA is heavily dependent on its approximately 100 volunteers. Among them is Kathy Schaeffer, a volunteer instructor and ISEA board member. A lifelong Chicagoan who relocated near Traverse City in 2017, she loves working with students.
“When they ask questions and they get really engaged, it’s just so fun,” she says. “It’s also fun to be on the ship.”
All aboard
ISEA’s next big push is to continue moving in the direction of providing year-round opportunities for kids to learn.
“Typically what we want to be able to do is provide these educational programs throughout the year and not just in the sailing months, so when the boats aren’t able to sail in the cold months of the year, we focus on the land-water connection with students,” Sitkins says.
ISEA already conducts programs on land that help familiarize participants with the watershed and how actions there affect the Great Lakes as a whole.
“We can bring students into wetlands that typically are not as accessible in the summer because they’re either too wet or buggy,” he says.
In fact, the organization has been piloting a broad range of programs in recent years to gauge which make the most sense, Sitkins notes, adding, “We’re casting a really wide net right now to look through issues and try to land on which programs have the most effect.
