A few days in the woods. A lifetime of impact. Kids are why the School of Conservation is worth saving.

Dennis Toft grew up in an interesting section of Lawrence Township. He was close enough to Trenton that he could throw a rock and hit it. And close enough to a local industrial site that parts of his neighborhood eventually ended up on a Superfund list.

Looking back, he realized he didn’t know what he didn’t know — until he took a trip that changed everything.

Every year, the fifth graders at Slackwood Elementary School looked forward to what they called the Stokes trip — a visit to the New Jersey School of Conservation in Sussex County, where they would spend a few days away from home and out in the woods.

Toft was 11 years old. He remembers the pond ecology class most clearly.

“We were walking around the lake and looking at plants and species and just getting fascinated by the things I could see there that I wasn’t seeing where I was living,” he said. “It was just different. It was eye-opening and encouraging and got me started thinking about the environment and the outdoors in a positive way.”

That interest, sparked in late 60s, never left him. By the time Toft got to law school, the path was clear.

“Environmental law seemed interesting to me,” he said. “And that’s how I got to where I am today. It all started back in fifth grade.”

Today, Toft is co-chair of the environmental law group at Chiesa Shahinian & Giantomasi and one of New Jersey’s top environmental attorneys. His journey, however, is not that unusual.

The New Jersey School of Conservation has been producing moments like his since 1949 as hundreds of thousands of students, teachers and researchers have passed through its 240-acre campus in Stokes State Forest.

Now, for the first time in its 76-year history, the school has been zeroed out of New Jersey’s proposed FY27 budget, an action that will close the school if it stands.

Two budget resolutions — Senate Resolution 302 and Assembly Resolution 990 — would restore $3 million. The June 30 deadline is approaching.

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The school’s curriculum spans water ecology, metal smithing, archery, discovery hikes, ropes courses and team-building activities — all tied to New Jersey’s core curriculum standards, all designed around a simple philosophy.

Kerry Kirk Pflugh, the school’s executive director, describes it as teaching kids not what to think, but how to think.

“We’re teaching how to problem solve, how to be aware of our ecosystems, how to identify problems, do the research, and come up with solutions,” she said. “How to get along collaboratively, working as teams.”

Those are not skills that show up on a standardized test. They are skills that show up in a career — in an engineering firm, a law office, a construction company or anywhere else that requires people to understand the world they are operating in and work with others to navigate it.

Jen Coffey, president of the Friends of NJSOC, sees something else happening when kids get into the woods — something the research increasingly backs up.

“The mental emotional wellness research that has been done on having kids outside in nature — it’s really the antidote to the stress we’re seeing from social media and all the screen time,” she said. “It brings back wonder and joy and inquisitiveness and friendship and problem solving.”

About half the students who come to the school are from Title One overburdened communities. For many of them, the Stokes trip is their first time sleeping away from home, their first time in a forest, their first time seeing a macro invertebrate under a magnifying glass.

“When young people have this experience, it can be transformative,” Pflugh said. “It really can change lives.”

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Dan Kennedy, CEO of NAIOP New Jersey and vice president of the Friends of the School of Conservation, sees the school’s value through a different lens, but he arrives at the same conclusion.

For Kennedy, the school is about workforce development and the kind of foundational skills that no classroom can replicate. The engineers, architects and contractors who work on New Jersey’s development projects need workers who understand how the natural world functions.

Getting kids into the woods — away from screens and comfort zones — is where that understanding starts, he said.

“Getting kids off their phones and into the woods, learning about the world and how it works is really important for society as a whole,” Kennedy said. “Commercial real estate benefits when society functions well.”

NAIOP made a direct contribution to subsidize a trip to the school for the Paterson school district — a modest investment, Kennedy said, that any business in New Jersey could replicate. He is actively encouraging other organizations to do the same, suggesting NAIOP could match their efforts.

It’s worth it, Kennedy said.

“It’s a great opportunity to simply help kids get off their phones, out of their comfort zones and into the woods to learn about the world,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

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The impact of the school has been changing in recent years.

In addition to grade schoolers, it also is seeing new demand from high school students drawn by the growth of STEM and STEAM programs, capstone projects and research-based coursework. Nine academic institutions have formally signed on as research partners, sending students and faculty to the campus for field study and internships.

Demand, Pflugh said, is growing faster than the school can accommodate.

“We’re starting to turn people away because we don’t have the capacity to accept them,” she said.

That is the context for the current budget fight. A school that is turning students away, serving a growing research community and reaching kids from overburdened communities has been zeroed out of the state budget for the first time in its 76-year history.

To do so at a time when the impact of climate change and climate events has never been greater, is hard to fathom.

Toft’s pond is still there. The question is whether the school that showed it to him — and to hundreds of thousands of others — will be.