‘Living Lab’ of Wetlands Enthralls Youngsters : Education: Audubon volunteers excite students about the environment in classroooms in Culver City, Santa Monica and Los Angeles.

Armando Armenta grasps his bird book as he searches the worn pages for a great blue heron, which he recalls seeing last year when he visited the Ballona Wetlands.

It took just a few visits to the marsh to spark a change in the 10-year-old. Bird-watching, he says, now rates higher on his list than all sports except baseball.

A fifth-grader at Broadway Elementary School in Venice, Armando is one of thousands of children enrolled in a National Audubon Society program introduced a year ago in Westside classrooms. The program is part of the science curriculum in grades four through six in the Culver City, Santa Monica and Los Angeles school districts.

Teachers involved in the program attend four Audubon workshops, where they learn to spark students’ interest in the environment by using Audubon newspapers to teach about recycling, plants and wildlife creatures, such as bats, turtles and spiders.

Students are are encouraged to adopt a local endangered species and to develop an action plan to save the animal. It’s part of a broader effort to get them to think about ways to save threatened wildlife.

For children involved in the program on the Westside, there is a bonus: A chance to learn about and visit a local environmental treasure, the Ballona Wetlands.

The program culminates in a spring field trip to the wetlands, just south of Marina del Rey, where the students get a firsthand look at the marsh in the company of trained Audubon volunteers.

Melanie Ingalls, project director of the Audubon Society’s Los Angeles education division, said one goal of the program is to expose city children to what nature has to offer.

“There’s a change taking place as the population becomes increasingly urban,” she said. “More people will grow up without experience in the outdoors, and they’re going to be the ones making decisions about clear air and water and open space.”

Gloria Mendelsohn, who teaches the fourth grade at Broadway Elementary, said her class’s field trip to the wetlands last spring made classroom learning come alive.

“They didn’t know what wetlands were before and didn’t have any awareness of them,” she said. “Since then, they have been looking at birds. It was a whole new experience for them.” The trips also enable Mendelsohn’s students to escape the city for a day--a rare opportunity for many of them.

“Every field trip means something to these kids,” Mendelsohn said. “They stay home a lot because it’s unsafe where they live, so getting out of the neighborhood is very important to them.”

Her sentiments were echoed by Ed Tarvyd, a professor of marine biology at Santa Monica College.

“It’s an actual hands-on experience in a living laboratory,” Tarvyd said. “Some of those kids literally never see anything five to 10 miles from their house.”

A visit to Broadway Elementary shows that the up-close observation of life at the wetlands has sparked a new interest in nature for the children.

“They provide a home for the birds, and if there wasn’t a place like that, where would the birds go?” said fifth-grader J. R. Vaughn, a veteran of three trips to the Ballona Wetlands.

Funding for the Audubon program’s expansion into Westside schools came from a contribution by Maguire Thomas Partners of Santa Monica, the chief developer of the big Playa Vista project on land next to the Ballona Wetlands.

Maguire Thomas agreed to preserve and spend $10 million to restore 260 acres of the wetlands to settle a 1984 lawsuit filed by the Friends of Ballona Wetlands, which fought for 14 years to save the area from development.

The lawsuit was one of the last major obstacles Maguire Thomas had to overcome to develop Playa Vista, a multibillion-dollar project which would include 11,750 residential units, extensive office and commercial facilities, and a marina containing 750 boat slips.

Audubon officials won’t disclose the exact sum they received from Maguire Thomas to place the program in 350 classrooms over a three-year period, but the organization’s 1991 annual report listed the firm in the $50,000-and-over contribution category.

In recent months, the environmental instruction in the classroom has coincided with a national debate over wetlands policy that the students at Broadway Elementary have followed with keen interest. One preliminary proposal from the Bush Administration that drew loud protests from environmental groups would have redefined what constitutes a wetland in a way that would have left about half of the nation’s wetland areas vulnerable to development. The policy is still under review.

In Mendelsohn’s class, the children have concluded that areas such as the Ballona Wetlands should be preserved whenever possible.

“I think they’re really nice. I think it’s a shame they’re trying to kill the wetlands,” said 9-year-old Brenda Valdovinos.

Classmate David Gomez, also 9, agreed.

“There’s not that much, so that’s why they should be saved,” he said.

Tarvyd, the Santa Monica College biologist, said he is glad the children understand the significance of the issue.

“My problem with redefining wetlands is that, when these schoolchildren grow up, all they’re going to be seeing of wetlands will be off videotapes and pictures out of the past--or wetlands far, far away from where they are,” he said.