Millbrook School, in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York, is a small, coeducational boarding school whose science facilities, campus, and academic program are very much out of the ordinary. In fact it is the only school in the entire U.S. which has its own canopy walkway, operated and maintained by high school students! But it’s just like every good school in that its teachers include many who know how much difference they can make in their students’ lives. It was a Millbrook biology teacher named Frank Trevor in the late 1950s who inspired the Smithsonian’s Thomas Lovejoy (Class of 1959, and a participant in PASSPORT TO THE RAINFOREST.) to begin his career in conservation biology. Today’s science department chairman, H. Bruce Rinker, takes students every year on expeditions into the tropical rainforest. Rinker knows that providing immersion experiences like this can bring about life-long changes in young people’s attitudes toward biology and conservation.

This year, thanks to an Inmarsat satellite phone supplied by Magellan, students should be sending back bulletins and images of their trip. Also watch for Millbrook students interacting in real-time with rainforest researchers—up in the canopy along the Amazon—during the first LFRF program on April 7, 1998!