FEB 27, 2025 | NEWS | By Stella Ward (Guest Writer)
At the base of Woodland Park’s Rampart Range, tucked away among hundreds of aspen trees, is the Catamount Center. It has been the host of Colorado College’s Teaching and Research in Environmental Education program, also known as TREE, for the past 11 years.
However, the program may be in peril.
Colorado College’s education department has announced on its website that TREE will not be running in 2025, giving no further indication of whether it will resume in 2026.
Founded in 2014 by Howard Drossman, a CC professor of environmental education, and his wife, Julie Francis, TREE is designed for students pursuing educational or environmental careers.
The program provides a unique opportunity for immersion in the surrounding nature and almost a hundred hours of teaching experience. Around 10 CC students each year make up the living and learning community, residing in dorm-style rooms on-site, being fed by a private chef, doing fieldwork in the nearby forests and teaching with schools in the surrounding area.
“For over a decade, TREE has offered students a transformative experience that has catalyzed the development of Environmental Leaders across the county and the globe,” said Tina Valtierra, associate professor of the education department. “The TREE semester has supported Environmental Education for hundreds of elementary and high school youth in the Pikes Peak region.”
“TREE was so special because I had a chance to gain a strong connection with the same group of kids and understand how they learn uniquely,” said Nico Rimer ‘27, a student who completed the TREE program last fall. “It really strengthened my teaching.”
Deviating from CC’s Block Plan, TREE students spend the entire semester building on previous lessons to follow the developmental trajectory of a group. Initially, TREE was a one-Block class hosted by the Catamount Center, but Drossman said he pushed against a reluctant CC board for the semester plan, wanting his students to be able to track the progress of the kids they worked with over 16 weeks.
The TREE curriculum follows an academically rigorous model that asks participants to create and execute their own teaching curriculum and create a portfolio to receive a state certification through the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education.
“Coming back from the program made me realize how much valuable, hard work we were able to accomplish, and how unique of an experience it was,” said Jane Barton ‘27, another TREE graduate.
Drossman completed his final semester as the head of TREE last fall. Upon his retirement, the TREE semester program came to a temporary halt.
Despite Drossman feeling as though he had set up all the staff and accommodations necessary to proceed with TREE in 2025, he said higher-ups have decided not to fund it for the year.
“The thing that hit me is the 30,000 student hours that we did in those 10 years … it’s that getting sacrificed,” Drossman said. “Somebody has to go to those schools and tell them that their students aren’t gonna get that environmental education next year.”
After reaching out to the Dean of the Faculty, Emily Chan, through various emails, phone calls, and in-person visits, The Catalyst received no comment from her.
The impact of TREE on its participants can’t be overstated.
According to Drossman, around 90% of TREE students have submitted an education portfolio to the state and gotten certified by the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education, with about a third getting certified to the highest level.
“Even though it is only a very small group of CC students who actually participate in TREE every year, I think that the program leaves a profound impact on everyone that does it,” said Alexandra Hyman ‘28.
Hyman had planned to apply for the TREE program in 2025 before learning about its hiatus.
To prevent a situation like TREE’s fall, Drossman and his team worked for years to try and create a framework that would allow TREE to flow seamlessly into new leadership after he left.
The Drossmans introduced the idea of donating the Catamount Center to CC over six years ago. The TREE staff sprung into action, working hard to organize every part of the process and appoint Drossman as the interim director.
At the time, CC’s president, Jill Tiefenthaler, was on board with the idea and eager to work with Drossman, he said. However, these clear-cut plans went slightly awry when Tiefenthaler resigned later that year which was followed by the pandemic’s freeze of normal college operations.
When the next president, L. Song Richardson, accepted the position, a similar sequence of events followed, with her resignation coming quickly after she committed to incorporating the Catamount Center and CC, Drossman said.
In the years the TREE faculty was pushing for integration with CC, the college saw five new development directors and three new presidents, according to Drossman.
“We were back to square one again and again. That was hard. At this point we had been at it almost seven years,” Drossman said.
Drossman said his request to take the director position in the process of adopting the Catamount Center to CC was never filled, and the framework he had wanted to create for TREE’s future, what would come after him, was never recognized by CC.
“The first question they always ask me is, ‘do we have to keep running TREE?’ and I would always say no,” Drossman said about CC’s administration. “It wasn’t until this year that they canceled TREE that I saw how hard it would be to think about that, largely because of the number of kids who weren’t gonna get exposed to environmental education and how important that was to me and Julie.”
Those attending schools in Woodland Park are surrounded by nature, and Drossman’s mission involves giving them a deeper understanding and connection to what is around them. He said the kids loved it, with soaring feedback coming to TREE each year.
An institution that prides itself on sustainability, unique learning models, and involvement with the natural world, a program that embodies all those principles fell through regarding funding priorities.
“They own something they feel they need to make money on rather than go to mission alignment with environmental education,” said Drossman.