It’s part of the lesson kids learn every year when they participate in the Central Kitsap Kiwanis Club’s Salmon in the Classroom project: Baby salmon that are released downstream will return to the same stream once they’re full-grown to produce another generation.

Unfortunately, the project itself may not be able to make a similar return.

“It’s been more and more difficult to get people from the club to take the time to do it,” Kiwanis Club member and project co-founder Sam Holcomb said. “We just won’t be able to do it.

“It’s one of those kinds of things that’s really demanding.”

The project has been a staple of Central Kitsap and the Clear Creek Trail for almost 20 years, but dwindling membership among the Kiwanis and the absence of a willing and able person to take point could lead to at least a scaling back for next year.

That is, unless, someone else is willing to take on the project.

Holcomb and other Kiwanis members are actively looking for something — a person, business, government agency, whatever — to take the reins and keep the project running.

“We just don’t have anybody who’s willing to do that right now,” Holcomb said.

Or who’s willing to do that just yet.

The club just recently began to look for a new steward of the salmon project and is hopeful it will be able to continue.

Holcomb was one of the founders of the project and has helped teach two generations of Central Kitsap students about salmon life cycles and the overall tenets of environmentalism.

“I have really mixed emotions about it because I’ve been involved in it since the beginning,” Holcomb said.

The club plans to contact Kitsap County officials and other local agencies to see if they’d be interested in taking the salmon project over.

The Snohomish County Public Works Department manages that county’s salmon project, one that the Kiwanis “sort of copied,” Holcomb said.

He also guessed that the club might be able to continue to oversee the many aquariums throughout Kitsap County schools, though not the annual field trips out to Clear Creek Trail.

If a person or group did take the salmon project over, they would be inheriting an increasingly popular program.

“We had the best year we’ve ever had (in 2008),” Holcomb said. “It was super, it was really great.”

More than 1,000 students showed up to parts of Clear Creek Trail to release salmon and learn about the environment during a one-month span in March and April of this year.

“I know the teachers will want to keep the program going,” Holcomb said.

The program has proven popular with kids and adults, some of whom participated in the program as children and have kids who are participating now.

For Holcomb, however, a man who’s been throwing everything he has into the project for two decades now, the time has come to hang it up.

“I’ve been doing this for 18 years,” Holcomb said. “I need to retire.”