With kelp dissections, ocean-inspired artwork and field trips from the La Jolla tide pools to the San Elijo Lagoon, Rancho Santa Fe School District celebrated 30 years of Ocean Week from March 2-6.
During Ocean Week, each grade level explores a different marine habitat, building ocean literacy across ponds, the seashore, sandy beaches, wetlands, kelp forest and the open ocean. Visiting experts gave presentations on topics like whales and coral reefs and the students participated in hands-on activities and habitat-inspired artwork such as underwater self portraits, tule and cattail weaving, and chalk drawings of long-billed Curlews, a shorebird that students learned uses its long, curved bill to dig into the mud for snacks like crabs and shrimp.
Rowe second graders in Linda Tan’s class show off their Ocean Week art with visiting educator Ane Carla Rovetta. (Karen Billing)
Students perfomed “The Magic School Bus: On the Ocean Floor” for Ocean Week’s opening ceremony at R. Roger Rowe School. (Stacey Halboth)
R. Roger Rowe middle school students put on an Ocean Festival for Ocean Week. (Karen Billing)
R. Roger Rowe middle school students put on an Ocean Festival for Ocean Week. (Karen Billing)
R. Roger Rowe School students made underwater self-portraits for Ocean Week. (Karen Billing)
R. Roger Rowe middle school students put on an Ocean Festival for Ocean Week. (Karen Billing)
Rowe middle schooler McKenna Perry with her Ocean Week Ocean Festival project. (Karen Billing)
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Rowe second graders in Linda Tan’s class show off their Ocean Week art with visiting educator Ane Carla Rovetta. (Karen Billing)
Ocean Week trickled into the previous week with an opening ceremony on Feb. 27 featuring a lively student play “The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor”. Some guest presentations and field trips will also continue into the coming weeks.
Superintendent Kim Pinkerton said Ocean Week is a critical piece of R. Roger Rowe’s curriculum and acknowledged the “exceptional effort” of language arts intervention teacher Stacey Halboth and Roberta Dean, an ocean literacy specialist who founded the MARE (Marine Activities Research and Education) curriculum at UC Berkeley and has worked with the district on Ocean Week since 1993. She works alongside her husband Bruce Stewart, a biological illustrator and marine science education specialist who helped start a lot of education programs at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Roger Rowe personally sent Halboth to Dean’s MARE Summer Institute in the early 1990s to train in depth with the curriculum. An inspired Halboth brought the program to Rancho Santa Fe with Dean—they even trained neighboring Solana Santa Fe School in the program and that school has been running Ocean Week for just as long. The district stopped Ocean Week after 2019 amid a leadership transition and it returned in 2023 after a brief hiatus in which it was dearly missed.
“They’ve ensured the longevity of this community event by making the program documents sustainable for our future,” said Pinkerton of Dean and Halboth, who recently announced she will be retiring at the end of the school year. “We are confident this tradition will inspire our students and community for years to come.”
The 30-year-milestone will be celebrated in a beautiful new mosaic mural that students and teachers made with Tim Lueker, a Scripps Oceanography researcher and artist who also helped with several of the other ocean murals on campus over the years. The new mural will be unveiled near the school’s front gates in the coming months.