September 6, 2024

By Brian McGreal, WSG Science Communications Fellow

Students practice butchering fish in the High School Seafood Butchery pilot program. Photo courtesy of Maggie Michaels.

In the spring of 2024, students at high schools up and down the Oregon coast engaged with a different sort of education. Armed with sharpened knives and fish scalers, high school students learned to debone albacore, filet salmon and shuck oysters under the auspices of the Oregon Coast Visitors Association’s newly launched Seafood Butchery Pilot Program. Designed to increase young people’s awareness and interest in jobs in the coast’s seafood-driven economy, the program is connecting students and teachers with fishers throughout the region and exposing youth on the coast to seafood in ways they may not have been before. At the center of all this is director Maggie Michaels, whose passion for culinary education and experience in Oregon public schools made her an ideal choice to lead the program..

Michaels knew she wanted to be an educator since she was 15 years old. After attending college at the University of Oregon, where she double majored in English and Sociology, she went on to receive her master’s in education at Lewis and Clark College in Portland in 2002. She spent the next nine years as a Language Arts teacher in Portland public schools. 

In her time as a teacher, Michaels noticed the “brain drain” that happened to her students after lunch. Many didn’t seem to be eating nutritious meals, and she knew poor nutrition had a detrimental effect on learning. At the same time, there was a lack of culinary education on offer to students. While Michaels had always wanted to teach, she saw an opportunity to meet students’ needs throughout Portland’s public school system. “I teach Language Arts, but I’m teaching a whole child,” Michaels explains. “Success isn’t possible.” By helping children understand food and nutrition, she could enable them to thrive not only as students but as people. 

Taking a leap, Michaels resigned from her position in the classroom and developed a program she called The Curriculum of Cuisine. The program brought professional chefs into high schools across the city to lead hands-on learning opportunities focused on basic culinary skills and whole-food nutrition.

While Michaels was developing the Curriculum of Cuisine, a problem was taking shape on the Oregon coast. Fishing is foundational to life in the region, where a constellation of fishers, aquaculturists, processors, seafood restaurants and fish markets makes up a “blue economy” that employs roughly 43,000 people and generates approximately $3 billion annually. However, the workforce driving the blue economy is aging, while young people are lacking many of the skills necessary to take the place of those retiring. In an effort to address this issue, the OCVA/OCI (Oregon Cluster Initiative) launched a number of initiatives designed to create awareness and engagement with the blue economy, including a program that would provide exploration of Blue Economy workforce opportunities in high school classrooms. Once the idea was in place, the OCVA needed only to find the right person to realize it.

When the COVID-19 pandemic put the Curriculum of Cuisine program on indefinite hold, Michaels began looking for other opportunities to connect young people with culinary education. In 2022, OCVA hired her to facilitate research and development for what would become the High School Seafood Butchery Pilot Program. Michaels’s job was to gauge the level of interest in seafood butchery and to establish working relationships with faculty and administrators who could facilitate the program. Eventually she enlisted six teachers at six different high schools, from Tillamook Bay south to Port Orford, to participate in the initial phase of the program. 

(From right) Maggie Michaels and Patrick McKnight, an educator who took part in the program pilot. Photo courtesy of Maggie Michaels.

The High School Seafood Butchery Pilot Program launched in the spring semester of 2024. The program is actualized in the classroom, where teachers give hands-on lessons in the butchery of several species of fish and crustaceans, including black cod, salmon, Dungeness crab, albacore and sturgeon. The seafood used in the program is all Oregon landed and sustainably caught, with Michaels making every effort to source fish from as close to each participating school as possible. Beyond the classroom, the program also partners with the Oregon Restaurants and Lodging Association to provide paid summer work experience in blue economy jobs to students, with sixteen positions  available in the summer of 2024.

With the 2023-24 school year wrapped up, Michaels is spending the summer evaluating the program’s successes and determining where there is room for growth. One encouraging outcome has been high levels of interest in the program from community members. “Food has a deep connection to culture and place,” Michaels explained. “People are excited about what we’re doing, from parents to fishers to the community as a whole. ” Every teacher that participated in the initial phase of the program is eager to do so again in the fall, while Michaels is working to streamline the logistics of getting more locally caught fish into more coastal classrooms.  “We learned so much from the initial phase” Michaels says, “but there is still plenty of work to do.” Guided by her passion for education and access to healthy nutritious food, the program can only grow under Michaels’ stewardship.

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Washington Sea Grant, based at the University of Washington, helps people and marine life thrive through research, technical expertise and education supporting the responsible use and conservation of coastal ecosystems. Washington Sea Grant is one of 34 Sea Grant programs supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in coastal and Great Lakes states that encourage the wise stewardship of our marine resources through research, education, outreach and technology transfer.

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