Rosemary Clarke Middle Schoolers Explore Marine Science at Catalina Island

Eighth-grade science teacher Ben Veloz returned to Pahrump with 41 seventh- and eighth-graders after five days at the Catalina Island Marine Institute's Fox Landing campus, where students worked through a curriculum that spanned shark and ray touch-tank labs, invertebrate identification, guided dissections, intertidal zone surveys, and open-water reef snorkeling.

The program pairs CIMI instructors holding degrees in marine biology or ecology with structured lab rotations that mirror concepts taught in Pahrump classrooms. Students catalogued species, documented reef relationships in real time, and built field-research skills through kayaking and coastal hiking alongside the science sessions, translating textbook ecology into direct observation. Six adult chaperones accompanied the group, providing the supervision ratio required to move a school cohort to an island marine campus.

The classroom work does not stop at the shoreline. Students returned with field data and observations they are expected to present to the broader RCMS community, giving the five-day experience a post-return academic function and threading fieldwork into the school's longer-term science curriculum. Teachers and chaperones described the Fox Landing setting as the difference between reading about conservation pressure on marine ecosystems and actually measuring it, with students confronting ecological dynamics that no worksheet approximates.

Access to the trip is not automatic. RCMS has run sign-ups on a first-come, first-served basis, with families required to submit an initial payment to secure a spot, and fundraising is part of the program's annual cycle. Families interested in future participation or wanting to understand the financial pathway for their student can contact Veloz directly at bveloz@nyeschools.org. Whether spots expand in coming years will depend in part on how that community fundraising effort grows.

CIMI, a non-profit founded in 1979, hosts roughly 15,000 students per year across its three Catalina facilities, structuring programs to align with school science curricula and staffing them with credentialed marine scientists. For RCMS, the partnership represents one of the more concrete examples in Nye County of a public middle school sustaining a rigorous science program that reaches well beyond the Nevada high desert. Forty-one students who left Pahrump knowing marine science as a textbook subject returned knowing it as fieldwork.