Sly Park, short-handed on staff, has canceled trips for many Sacramento-area schools

Jannah Mahmoud was looking forward to her sixth grade field trip to Sly Park Environmental Education Center.

It was a five-day trip starting on March 6, and it has been a rite of passage for thousands of Sacramento area students over the decades.

Jannah, 11, started packing all of the recommended items on the list: a small shampoo bottle, bug repellent and gloves.

But just a couple of weeks before the scheduled trip, Sly Park officials called her school, Folsom Educational Academy, to cancel the trip.

The Pollock Pines campground was short on staff.

“I was looking forward to hikes, and mostly being outdoors and at the camp,” Jannah said.

In fact, Sly Park, had canceled trips for 21 schools since November 2022, affecting more than 1,200 students from several districts including Sacramento City Unified’s H.W. Harkness Elementary and San Juan Unified’s Cambridge Heights Elementary.

Park officials were able to re-book 10 of those schools, so 600 students will still be able to experience hiking in Eldorado National Forest, learning about astronomy and creating silk-screen t-shirts.

The campground typically serves about 7,500 students a year, according to the Sacramento Office of Education, and is nestled in between tall pine trees and along Jenkinson Lake. For more than 50 years, the staff has been offering educational field trips to Sacramento-area students.

It’s an unforgettable science learning experience for children. Plus for many students, it’s the first time they have been away from home.

“I have never gone on a trip like this before,” Jannah said. “And next year I will be in seventh grade. We won’t be able to go.”

But teacher and staffing shortages across the country and thousands of retirements affected programs like Sly Park, which is already facing competition from nearby campgrounds that can serve school districts in similar week-long trips.

Some schools like Cambridge Heights have rescheduled their trips to other campsites like Petaluma’s Walker Creek Ranch or Sonoma’s Alliance Redwoods.

Sly Park faced challenges, made improvements

Like many recreational sites, Sly Park closed during the pandemic, and children were unable to take field trips there as they learned through distance learning. Sly Park teachers offered science-based classes virtually, a program which many schools used during the pandemic.

But while the campground was closed, officials executed on many projects to renovate the decades-old site, including cafe and dormitory renovations, new roofs around the campus, a completely upgraded fire protection system, and HVAC installations.

Those renovations were threatened during the Caldor Fire, which prompted mandatory evacuations for the areas of Pollock Pines and Sly Park in 2021. The campground did not burn down.

What’s next?

It’s unclear how many schools will find a way off the waitlist and give students a memorable trip at the campgrounds this school year.

About 40 schools are waitlisted for upcoming weeks at the park. That amounts to about 2,300 students are waiting anxiously to hear if they can visit the park with their classes.

But the cancellations don’t seem to have deterred schools from registering for spots for the 2023-24 school year. Nearly 100 schools, with a total of 6,500 students, have reservations for the upcoming school year, according to SCOE. And 10 schools are waitlisted or have yet to decide if they will reserve a field trip at the campgrounds.

For now, Jannah’s school is waitlisted for a May date at Sly Park.

She feels hopeful about the possible trip and said she wishes that SCOE would hire more staff.

“We were supposed to be there this week,” Jannah said. “So it just makes me really sad.”