Tremont science teacher Tonya Prentice is earning national honors while her students earn state ones, by giving students real-world science experiences—on land, at sea, and beyond Earth.

Shaun Farrar

Jan 16, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by the Maine Seacoast Mission.

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TREMONT—On Mount Desert Island, there are a lot of teachers who go out of their way to enrich students in ways that move beyond the classroom, ways that illustrate how learning and life can create something bigger than a textbook or an aging school or state-standardized test results.

Tonya Prentice, a science teacher at Tremont Consolidated School is one of those teachers.

“Tonya is one of many exceptional educators in this building. She is fortunate that she is in a field, the field of science, where kids really love to engage. It’s so much hands-on that kids really just eat it up. She just takes advantage of what’s out there and builds enthusiasm and builds their confidence and gives them opportunities to see what’s possible,” said Tremont Consolidated School Principal Jandrea True. “I think that teachers in Tremont and teachers in general all strive to do that same thing.”

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THE TEACHER AT SEA PROGRAM

American historian Henry Adams is believed to have said, “A teacher affects eternity; he (or she) can never tell where his influence stops.”

In the Fall of 2024, after having applied to and been excepted into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Teacher at Sea Program, Prentice boarded NOAA’s Henry B. Bigelow research vessel for a two-week adventure.

The Teacher at Sea Program allows participating teachers to bring back to their classrooms real life experience of working and living on an oceangoing vessel while at the same time creating lesson plans built upon the teacher’s own experiences and learning from their time aboard.

On board the vessel, Prentice assisted the crew with conducting a monitoring survey of the ecosystem of the Northeastern U.S. shelf. Part of this project included deploying monitoring buoys that would be taking certain measurements and transmitting the measurements and the buoys location via satellite on an hourly basis.

Prentice was assigned two of those buoys whose data her students would be able to track back in the classroom as part of a learning plan. Before deployment, Prentice placed stickers from the Tremont Consolidated School and also the Teacher at Sea program as identifying markers on the buoys.

According to a NOAA article written about Prentice’s buoy story, as of December 2, 2025, one of the buoys is still floating around, in the Azore Islands area at the time, collecting data, data that Prentice’s students can still track and analyze.

The second buoy did not fair so well. Sometime in January of 2025, as it was nearing the coast of Delaware, its drogue became detached. The drogue is a fabric “tail” that is connected to the buoy and has part of the information transmitting system that collects subsurface water temperatures. Like the drogue on a boat, it helps maintain control and stability and also slows the movement of the buoy.

Once the drogue became detached, the buoy could no longer transmit accurate data, though it was still transmitting, and became essentially just a floating object, like an empty plastic bottle susceptible to the whims of the waves and tides.

The buoy’s final transmission was in late April 2025.

The buoy was spotted by someone in mid-May and eventually ended up at a dock in Berlin, Maryland, that is owned by George Berrue. Seeing all of the stickers, Berrue contacted Prentice and asked if she would like to have the buoy back.

Berrue got the buoy out of the water, by this time it was covered in algae and barnacles, and cleaned it up. He then drove it to NOAA’s Cooperative Oxford Lab in Oxford, Maryland, where it spent a couple of weeks being further cleaned, dried out, and prepped to be returned to Prentice via FedEx.

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THE OUTSTANDING BIOLOGY TEACHER AWARD

In November 2025, Prentice won an Outstanding Biology Teacher Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT). She was one of only 27 teachers nationwide and the only teacher in Maine to win an award from NABT.

For this award, she was recognized during a ceremony at the Tremont Consolidated School and also by a resolution recognizing her achievement from the Tremont Select Board.

At the select board’s November 17 meeting, after its members unanimously approved the resolution, Select Board Chair Jamie Thurlow said, “We would like to recognize Tonya for her Outstanding Biology Teacher Award that she received from the National Association of Biology Teachers and to thank her for her outstanding service that she has given the town and our school.”

After, Thurlow presented Prentice with a plaque and some flowers.

“I’m deeply honored to receive the Outstanding Biology Teacher Award, but the real celebration belongs to my students and the Tremont community. Their curiosity, support, and enthusiasm make teaching a joy and push me to grow continually as an educator. Helping students explore the ecosystems that surround us, especially here in such a remarkable place, is endlessly rewarding. Whether we’re out in the salt marsh, snowshoeing the trails, or observing the changing coastline, my students get to experience science in action. This community and this landscape shape everything I do as an educator, and I’m grateful every day to be a part of it,” Prentice told the Bar Harbor Story after the presentation.

According to the NABT website, “Every year, the Outstanding Biology Teacher Award (OBTA) program attempts to recognize an outstanding biology educator (grades 7-12 only) in each of the 50 states; Washington, DC; Puerto Rico, Canada; and overseas territories. A major portion of the nominee’s career must have been devoted to the teaching of biology/life science, and candidates are judged on their teaching ability and experience, cooperativeness in the school and community, and student-teacher relationships.”

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THE TREMONT LUNAR LEGENDS AND THE BUILD THE MOON CHALLENGE

On January 15, Prentice’s students received some well earned recognition, too.

At a presentation at the Tremont Consolidated School, the students of her sixth grade science class, calling themselves the Lunar Legends, were recognized for winning Best in Show for the middle school division of the Build the Moon Challenge. The challenge is put on by the Institute of Competition Sciences.

According to its website, “The Institute of Competition Sciences is a full-service education and workforce development firm specializing in the design and management of challenge-based learning programs.”

The premise of the Build the Moon Challenge according to its webpage, is to “help NASA explore how lunar regolith could be used in the construction of future lunar habitats and their supporting infrastructure!”

The three fundamental tasks of the challenge included:

• “Developing a Regolith Concrete Mixture,
• “Demonstrating the Construction Capabilities of your Concrete,
• “Using your Concrete to Design a Lunar Habitat and Supporting Infrastructure.”

After the project was completed, the contest required submission of each of the project activities and results via a log book, photos, and written descriptions. The Lunar Legends also submitted a slide show format presentation of their work. The written descriptions were required to contain testing of the team’s products and the process for development of the products.

Prior to the presentation, the Lunar Legends met with Maine Space Grant Consortium Executive Director Jeremy Qualls and his wife Soyoung Han, both of whom are physicists, and spoke about the team’s experiences with the project process, how their work could actually help space scientists, and the students plans for the future.

During the presentation, Qualls handed out swag bags to each team member that the consortium had provided while True gave each team member an award certificate.

In addition to swag bags and certificates, to help the students commemorate their accomplishments and remember the experience, the school purchased t-shirts for the team that featured the team’s logo, designed by the students, that they used for the competition.

There was also a fifth grade science class team, the Cosmic Crusaders, that participated in the same lesson plan as part of the competition but unfortunately did not win an award. At the presentation, True acknowledged the hard work of the Cosmic Crusaders.

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EQUITABLE RESOURCES, MINDSETS AND BUDGETS

After the presentation, one younger student who had attended with his class walked up to Qualls and said, “I am a huge fan of NASA. I am glad this is happening.”

This boy’s statement recognizes teacher and student achievement is not about pageantry but about showing other students, parents, and community members what can be accomplished with the right resources and mindset.

“Different communities need different resources,” True said. “We have been incredibly fortunate at Tremont over the last few years building a culture that is attracting very strong educators and we are building a community (at the school) that people are enjoying being a part of. Getting the people (educators and staff) here is part of it, but having equitable resources that match the student needs is what’s really important.”

Like all communities in the area, Tremont is facing a budget increase partially due to school needs. True recognizes this and the burden it can be on taxpayers.

“Nobody wants to pay more taxes. I live in this community; I don’t want to pay more taxes. However, I want Tremont students, or any students, who might struggle outside of school to be able to enter their education and know that they are capable of exactly the same things as everybody else and in order to help them realize that it may take more resources in some communities than others,” said True.

When asked about her apparent desire to create lessons and learning opportunities for her students, Prentice said that it is really important for teachers to also be continuously learning.

“We need to continue to learn what’s out there, things are changing all the time, and if we are going to teach our students we need to be up to date on things. It’s important to bring real world ideas and concepts into the classroom and show kids how what they are learning is applying to real life and how they can use those skills. It also opens up ideas and opportunities,” Prentice said. “They are in middle school; they don’t know what they are going to do 10 years, 20 years from now, but the more they know, the more opportunities they have and experiences, it opens up those doors for them. That’s really what my goal is. That as they get out into the real world they will have some interests and they will feel confident in being able to try those interests and take risks.”