The future of the National Park Service has been under the microscope since the Trump administration suggested a $1 billion cut to the NPS budget in May. Though Congress rejected the cut, the House and Senate continue to spar over funding the 109-year-old institution, whose parks welcome 318 million annual visitors.
With 24% of NPS staff laid off this year, Americans already lament a loss of access to expertise and programming that connect us to the land and solidify our understanding of our past. As a mother, I fear further cuts will affect our nation’s youth.
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My children will not receive lessons on United States history until the fifth grade through public school. For years, I have taught them our country’s history through age-appropriate picture books and by using vacations as a springboard for visiting the sites that bring our past to life. The NPS Junior Ranger program is a recent addition to our history practice.
Nearly every park in the NPS system has a tailored booklet that prompts children to experience the site in an interactive, memorable, and educational manner. When finished, kids present their work to a Ranger, swear an oath to share their findings with others, and receive a special patch, button, or sticker as a reward for their efforts.
I discovered the Junior Ranger program by happy accident while conducting research for a Washington Examiner story about Civil War hero Lt. Col. John Gilluly. NPS Ranger Mary O’Neill greeted me at the Sunken Road battlefield last summer with a Fredericksburg Junior Ranger packet for my daughter and a stack of battle maps and firsthand accounts of the battle for me.
While O’Neill led me through her findings, my daughter raced around the museum and grounds with delight to search out answers to the questions in her packet. Seeing her stand before a Ranger to recite her oath made my heart swell with pride.
The Junior Ranger badge for Fredericksburg contains one large central badge and four rockers that must be earned individually at the major battlefields in the area: Spotsylvania, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Wilderness. Earning all four rockers became a family goal that we decided to work on last month, with a detour to the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield during a family vacation.
The Spotsylvania exhibit shelter was filled with people on the uncharacteristically cool summer morning when we arrived. On informational posters along the walls, we found answers to several pages of questions about the battle’s main locations, various troop strengths and conflict length, and the importance of trenches and earthworks in the warfighting.
The packet’s contents then took on a more somber note when we arrived at the site of the Bloody Angle, where Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had sent 20,000 Union troops to attack an exposed salient in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate lines of earthworks and trenches on May 12, 1864. The more than 20-hour battle that took place there led to 17,000 casualties and left stacks of dead soldiers four and five deep in blood-blackened mud. There was no decisive victor.
Today, the carnage is hard to imagine in the peaceful, grassy expanse filled with large monuments to the battle participants. Even the reinforced earthworks are now little more than bumps that run in a clearly man-made formation throughout the field of tall grass.
Avoiding direct confrontation with the bloodbath that took place at the Bloody Angle, the Junior Ranger packet directed my daughter to answer questions about battlefield relics like a thick tree that had been bisected by the heavy crossfire of the battle, and asked her to respond to the recollection of one Spotsylvania veteran who reported that following the battle, men “sat down on the ground and wept. Not silently, but vociferously and long.”
Back at the exhibit shelter, Ranger Peter Maugle walked us through some of the Spotsylvania Court House highlights. As we walked, Maugle gently described the layout of the battle and described what life had been like for the residents of the area as troops amassed on their property. When my daughter became distracted by ants crawling across a large metal compass, Maugle patiently explained that caring for all the living creatures in the park is among the duties of NPS staff.
Maugle talked with my daughter about her Junior Ranger packet, administered the Junior Ranger oath, and delivered her Spotsylvania rocker.
While my children helped fill up the shelter’s bins of battlefield maps, I told Maugle that I was grateful to have the Junior Ranger packet when wading through the difficult history of the Bloody Angle with two small children. Maugle told me that creating this segment of the four battlefield booklets “was the hardest one. … How do you tell a young person about what happened here without candy coating it, but not going too far?”
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The NPS Rangers have navigated the history well. They impart a first-hand introduction to the Civil War to around 2,500 school-aged children who visit the four area battlefields annually, Maugle says.
Though NPS cannot issue a prognosis on the future of the Junior Ranger program amidst funding uncertainty, I hope Congress will recognize the incredible benefits NPS affords our nation and its children. Failing to fund the programs that reacquaint us with our land and our past would be a grave error.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the host of The Afghanistan Project.