Our First Trip 2014

Our October trip will be to Mt. Diablo State Park!  It’s tarantula mating season, so hopefully we’ll see a male out looking for love.  We’ll drive to the summit, check out the museum, and go back down a bit to Rock City.  Rock City has several rocky outcroppings and small caves.  We can make easy scrambles up the sandstone, or climb into small wind caves.  There are short trails that wind in and out and in between the rocks that we can explore.  We’ll watch for lizards, manzanita, and poison oak. 

Welcome Back!

Greetings ESCAPE Club Fans!

Welcome to another year of the ESCAPE Club at DeJean!  So exciting to finally get our website back online.  Thanks so much to Neal Pierce for making it happen!  
 
Our first meetings have been crowded, but manageable–somewhere between 70-80 kids in our humble classroom.  So far, Jason and I have a nice impression of the kids.  They’ve been well behaved, cooperative, and anxious for the trips.  We’re looking forward to our first excursion of the year to Rock City on Mt. Diablo.
 
For those who are able, we would be grateful to accept any financial support that you can offer.  Normally, the EdFund grant provides a substantial percentage of our budget, but this year they are doing things a little differently, which may leave us out in the cold.  (We are also still waiting on a couple corporate matching donations, which I’ve learned are either a scam, or at best, unreliable.)  Again, the simplest way is to send checks directly to me, made out to ‘John Iwawaki’.  If you’d like the tax deduction, they can go through the EdFund, and I can provide more info if you prefer to go in that direction.  It’s also possible that I can work with a check made out to the school, but let me confirm that first.
 
We’re excited to see what this year has in store.  Though we don’t know the kids very well yet, each cohort has its own personality, its own characters, and its own dynamic.  And we’re looking forward to reaching kids in new and deeper ways, both through our experiences away from school, and academically at the meetings.
 
Talk to you again soon!