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MONTEREY — In its largest expansion in more than 20 years, the Monterey Bay Aquarium is nearing completion on a $42 million, four-story education center on Cannery Row aimed at broadening its marine science programs for thousands of children and teachers.
Funded in large part by Silicon Valley and Bay Area donors, the new center is scheduled to open in June. It is the most significant new construction project for the world-famous aquarium since 1996, when the size of the facility grew by 43 percent with the opening of its Outer Bay wing, whose primary exhibit is a massive tank full of tuna, sharks and sea turtles.
Although the aquarium, which draws roughly 2 million visitors a year, is known for sea otters, jellyfish and schools of fish, it also has long cultivated a close connection with schools of children.
Since it opened in 1984, the aquarium has allowed 80,000 school children from across Northern California and the Central Valley free admission every year as part of school field trips. Roughly 300 teens a year also participate in aquarium camps, volunteer programs and school research, and 250 teachers go through aquarium training annually to learn new ways of teaching science.
“Our goal is to create the next generation of young leaders who are ocean-literate, confident and ready to act,” said Julie Packard, the aquarium’s executive director.
Packard said that California’s schools have uneven levels of science education at a time when science literacy is growing in importance. The aquarium is expanding its programs with the hopes that future voters and workers have an opportunity to learn science, she said, particularly ocean issues like climate change, wildlife biology and plastics pollution.
“It is going to take a lot of smart, engaged people to solve the challenges we have,” Packard said.
The new facility, which will be called the Bechtel Family Center for Ocean Education, is located at the corner of Hoffman Avenue and Cannery Row on the site of a former warehouse used to stack pallets of sardine cans. It will have five classrooms, solar panels on the roof, numerous video monitors and eight 200-gallon salt water tanks full of sea urchins, starfish, abalone, snails, anemones, kelp crabs and other marine species for kids to study. The aquarium, located three blocks down the street, only has two classrooms.
On a recent day last week, the new building — with massive windows facing Monterey Bay — was teeming with 50 construction workers in hard hats and orange vests, the air punctuated by the sounds of hammers and whirring saw blades.
When the building opens in six months, school children on field trips will still go to the main aquarium building to see the animals. But they also will spend time in the education center in more focused learning programs. The number of teens and teachers served also will double starting next year, said Rita Bell, the aquarium’s vice president of education.
“The kids don’t have to be a marine biologist,” she said. “We want to show them all the other career opportunities and feed that passion. We want to help them find their voice. What’s important to me and how do I get that out?
“If kids learn about the ocean,” Bell said, “they are learning about more than the ocean — everything from math to reading.”
The two largest donors to the project are Gordon Moore of Woodside, the co-founder of Intel, who along with his wife, Betty, contributed $10 million, and the family foundation of Stephen Bechtel, Jr., of San Francisco, the former chairman of Bechtel engineering and construction company, who also donated $10 million.
Two years ago, $4 million for the project was raised at a dinner in Palo Alto attended by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, John Chambers of Cisco, venture capitalist John Doerr, and dozens of other Silicon Valley leaders. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates attended by video.
To fund its wider education programs, the aquarium is looking to raise roughly $5 million a year in the coming years.
Yazmin Ochoa was 15 when her class from Everett Alvarez High School in Salinas visited the aquarium. Inspired, she joined the “Teen Conservation Leader” program, and learned about sea otter biology, bio-accumulation of toxic chemicals in marine life, climate change and other marine science issues. She went on to mentor middle school girls at the aquarium’s “Young Women in Science” program, worked as a volunteer guide explaining marine science to tourists, and cited the experiences in her application to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where she now studies geography, environmental science and global health.
“It was something that wasn’t provided at my school,” said Ochoa, now 19. “We only learned very basic science. Going to the aquarium definitely opened up an area that I hadn’t explored. It gave me confidence. It changed my life. I came in one way and came out another way.”
Teachers say the programs also make a big difference. Tommie Ebanez teaches high school science at American High School in Fremont. He first went to the aquarium 20 years ago on a field trip at age 13, then graduated from San Diego State with a degree in wildlife biology.
After participating in the “Plastic Pollution Solutions” teacher trainings, he has taught his students about the chemistry and biology of plastics in the ocean, had them conduct trash audits of the school and brought students to aquarium symposiums where they present their projects.
“The aquarium has given me a chance to learn more,” he said, “and helped me expand my thinking. When you have a field trip or an overnight visit or you see other kids doing things, it’s authentic. It resonates. It’s more powerful than seeing a picture or seeing a Power Point presentation. It definitely leaves an impression.
