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Last fall, Natalie Peitsmeyer sold her house in Colorado, said goodbye to a community she’d known for decades and started a dream education job in Kansas. 

She became a park guide at the Fort Scott National Historic Site, a military outpost that was instrumental in the nation’s westward expansion and played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Peitsmeyer had just retired from the Cherry Creek School District southeast of Denver where she worked for 30 years as a science teacher and saw the National Park Service role as the next chapter in her long career teaching children. 

Peitsmeyer, 59, was in the middle of developing new programming around the disappearance of monarch butterflies when she got fired — just four months after her first day. 

“With retirement, I turned toward the national parks thinking that an interpretive ranger position would be a nice next step to expand my skill set — and to apply my skill set as well,” she told The 74. Now, she’s out of a job and is considering selling the home she just bought.

 “Trauma has been inflicted on the federal employees,” she said.

Peitsmeyer was one of some 1,000 park service employees who were axed last month as part of a broader federal shakeup by the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Some 700 other national park workers have accepted voluntary buyouts and, with a reported effort to reduce payroll by 30%, the parks could soon be gutted further.

Bill Wade, the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, said the rangers most affected by the layoffs “were the people who do the educational and interpretive programs in parks, do school groups, manage the visitor centers and so forth.”

“So to the extent that those kinds of people were fired, the likelihood is that ranger-led programs are going to be reduced,” Wade told The 74. 

While the passionate protests that has sprung up in the wake of the park service cuts — including from the Resistance Rangers, an independent group of roughly 800 off-duty rangers — have focused more on the threats to public land and the impact on the parks’ hundreds of millions of yearly adult visitors and families, the park service has a longstanding partnership with schools, teachers and students. 

Part of the mission of the National Park Foundation, the service’s nonprofit arm chartered by Congress in 1967, is its Youth Engagement & Education program, which has reached more than 2 million children since 2011. Last year, it put $5 million into its Open OutDoors for Kids venture that partners with schools and other groups “to provide opportunities for as many students as possible to inspire the next generation of park stewards.”

Other educational opportunities include Every Kid Outdoors, which gives fourth graders and their families free access to national parks nationwide, and the Junior Ranger program, which is designed to help young people learn about history and conservation through self-guided interactive activities. 

‘The highlight of your child’s school day’

During her short stint at the Fort Scott National Historic Site, Peitsmeyer dressed up as a Civil War nurse in January and taught second graders at Winfield Scott Elementary School about 19th-century medicine. 

The fort, which was built in 1842 to keep the peace between white settlers and neighboring indigenous tribes, became a site of strife in the 1850s when abolitionists fought for control of the abandoned complex and named it the Free State Hotel. 

After violent conflicts with pro-slavory forces, the abolitionists prevailed and Kansas entered the union as a free state just three months before the beginning of the Civil War. Fort Scott was transformed into a major Union military outpost and became a key supply depot for soldiers in the West. Among those sworn in at Fort Scott was the First Kansas (Colored) Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the first African-American unit to fight Confederate troops. 

Much of the complex was used as a hospital, Peitsmeyer said, primarily to treat Union soldiers. Most of the fatalities during the war, she taught the students, were from illness, not injury. Peitsmeyer saw the role as an opportunity to improve learning in both the parks and local schools. 

“My role — or the hope — was that I could bring more science into the park and link it to educational programming,” she said. The lessons she was planning on monarch butterflies involved threats to the vibrantly colored, long-distance travelers. She also hoped to build a butterfly house in the visitor center. In April, she said, the fort was planning what would have been an ambitious event about how Civil War encampments shaped America. 

“Prior to my termination, there were really serious questions as to whether or not we could actually host that type of programming because it was too large of an event,” said Peitsmeyer, who noted the fort now employs just one interpretive ranger. “I was just looking on the website to see if there was any advertisement about Civil War encampment, and I don’t see any so my guess is it’s probably been canceled.” 

In a viral Valentine’s Day social media post, Brian Gibbs wrote about “los[ing] my dream job of an Education Park Ranger” at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa. He talked about how the cuts could limit learning opportunities for children at his own site and the 432 others nationwide. 

“I am the highlight of your child’s school day,” Gibbs, who couldn’t be reached for comment, wrote on Facebook. “I am the lesson that showed your children that we live in a world of gifts- not commodities, that gratitude and reciprocity are the doorway to true abundance, not power, money, or fear.”  

Court orders rangers reinstated but …

 The Trump administration hasn’t released a list of Park Service employees whose jobs were eliminated, Wade, of the park rangers association, said, but efforts by advocates and fired workers suggest employees who worked as interpretive guides, managed school field trips and ran visitor centers were most likely to have received termination letters. Because the government announced plans to hire some 7,700 seasonal workers for the busy summer months, the full force of the staffing cuts could accelerate in the fall. 

Layoffs specifically targeted “probationary employees” who, like Peitsmeyer, had been in their position for less than a year before losing their jobs based on claims of poor performance. 

At parks across the country, the firings mean fewer workers to conserve natural resources and teach visitors — including students — about the nation’s natural and cultural history protected and preserved in the parks’ roughly 85 million acres. 

Staffing woes have already had an impact on educational opportunities at multiple parks, including closures and reduced hours at visitor centers. At Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, the staff was forced to cancel ranger-led tours of the caves and implement a shorter schedule for self-guided exploration — a change that affects visitors of all ages, although the park waives its fees for educational field trips.

Although two federal courts have found Trump’s cuts unlawful and have ordered federal agencies to reinstate purged workers, Peitsmeyer said she can’t wait for a long court battle before seeking work elsewhere. 

“It’s been a month and how long can people wait without health benefits?” she said. “I moved here specifically for the position, and at this point I’m considering — actually, I was ready to put my house on the market this weekend.” 

‘An easy target’

Families should “still go to the parks” to learn and relax this summer, Wade said, but not before visiting a specific national park’s website. He advises against showing up in person “and assuming that everything is going to be normal.” 

Wade noted that recent polls have shown wide bipartisan support for the National Park Service. Last Year, a Pew Research Center poll found that 76% of Americans — and 75% of Republicans — had a favorable opinion of the National Park Service, topping the list above the Postal Service, NASA and every other federal agency. 

“Park employees are on pins and needles waiting to see if their job is going to be next,” Wade said. “Unless the public gets angry enough and upset enough that they contact their elected officials and insist that this get turned around.” 

The retired superintendent of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Wade acknowledged the Trump layoffs aren’t the first the Park Service has endured, including reductions in the late 1990s by President Bill Clinton in an effort to balance the federal budget. But this time, he said, is different, with Trump’s cuts being carried out “totally indiscriminately.” 

“They [the rangers] were all sent the same exact memo which implied that it was based on ineffective performance, but you know, many of the people who were terminated shared their performance evaluations, which were fully successful or above,” he said. “It was just a broadsword approach.”

Peitsmeyer got the letter which, she said, was a lie. Her termination, she said, wasn’t truly based on her performance. In fact, she hadn’t yet undergone a formal evaluation. 

“Probationary employees were just an easy target,” she said. “All of the feedback that I had received while in this position with this national park site indicated that I was the polar opposite of what this termination letter was stating.”

Staffing reductions mean Fort Scott could be forced to limit the number of students who can make school visits, but Peitsmeyer fears a more existential threat to America’s smaller national treasures. Located in a town of just 7,500, her fort receives some 26,000 visitors annually. 

“My concern is, for a site that is as small as this,” she asked, “will it have the potential to be shut down?” 

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