FODC YAB: Youth for a Greener Community

March – Hitting the classrooms with WBoR

We continued to prepare for our watershed workshops this month, meeting every week or every other week to prepare and practice our presentations and working with the probes.  By now, we feel we are “Masters of Water Quality Monitoring!!”  Our hardwork and practice was put to the test with our UHS workshop at the end of the month.  Paige and Tesla were our presenters for this round of workshops and they did an excellent job at teaching the students about watershed science and water quality monitoring.  The students seemed very excited to go out into their local communities to collect data for our community water quality database.  Our UHS students will have the water quality probes for a little over a week and we assigned them with 3 possible scenarios for their data collection.  The first scenario was that they could collect data from the same spot in the same stream 3 times throughout the week.  We explained to them that this is what we call “baseline data” and that it helps us to determine the general condition of a stream.  We can then use this baseline data to detect any changes in the stream that may occur from various pollution sources.  The second scenario was that they could collect from 3 different streams, one time at each stream.  This might be consider baseline data for a portion of a watershed in that were would be determining the overall health of an area of a watershed, as well as detecting if an impacted stream might be contributing pollution downstream in the watershed.  The third scenario was that they could determine the level of impact a potential pollution source has on a stream by collecting data from three different sections of the stream – above the source, at the source, and below the source.  It will be very interesting to see the variety of data that the students bring back to our follow-up workshop in April.  With their data, we will be able to map out data points that contain water quality information throughout the community and watersheds in our area.  Overall, we completed 5 classroom workshops and distributed 75 probes to students at UHS.  Our first round of workshops was definitely a success and we hope to collect some great data!

February – Training our Youth Advisory Board for WBoR

This month we continued training for our youth-led watershed workshops in our area high schools.  Our YAB mentors have been instructing us on how to use our water quality probes, as well as briefing us on the various types of pollution that impact our waterways in our area.  We have learned a lot so far and have begun designing our workshop presentations and materials, including our powerpoint presentation and the data sheets that the high school students will use to record their data.  We have been visiting Deckers Creek to practice using the probes and data sheets to make sure they are user-friendly and that we are familiar and comfortable teaching the high school students how to use them.  To prepare for our workshops this month, our workshop committee has been meeting almost every Friday to work on and rehearse our workshop presentations.  Our first workshop will be at University High School in Morgantown on March 29.

January – Launching our Watershed Bill of Rights Program (WBoR)

Friends of Deckers Creek (FODC) recently received a grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency – Environmental Justice Small Grants program to launch a community media and education campaign, and a volunteer citizen scientist program to monitor our local streams for impacts from potential pollution sources – called the Watershed Bill of Rights program.  As part of our State Farm YAB grant, our FODC YAB will be launching a youth-led version of this program in our area high schools and this month we began our training and planning period.  So far we have contacted three area high schools and set dates to hit the classes for two of them in late March/early April.  During our monthly meeting this month, we also put together the committee of our YAB members who will be presenting in the classrooms and discussed the format and topics for our presentations.  As an outline for our general workshop presentation, we decided that we will educate high school students in the following areas:  1) watershed dynamics and healthy communities, 2) potential water pollution sources, including construction site and storm water runoff, illegal dumping and litter, dredge and fill, untreated sewage, and oil and gas drilling, and who you can contact if you see pollution occurring, 3) water quality parameters, including pH, conductivity, total dissolved solids, salinity, and temperature, and 4) how to properly calibrate and utilize our water quality probes for sampling local streams.  Finally and the most exciting for us, we ordered our water quality probes!  Thanks to our State Farm YAB grant, we were able to purchase 140+ water quality probes to distribute to high school students during our watershed workshops!  Think of all the great water quality data we’ll be receiving in the coming months!!

December – Expanding Recycling in Our Schools

Last year, we began our Recycling in Our Schools program with three of our area high schools and two middle schools.  We started out by having our YAB members launch a “recycling reconnaissance” in their schools to find our what their school’s recycling needs were and if there were any faculty, staff, clubs, or students that would be interested in helping with a recycling program.  What we discovered was an unmet need for recycling in our area schools and an overwhelming response from our school communities to install recycling programs.  Before we knew it, our first round of recycling bins were quickly and enthusiastically installed into our schools and more teachers and principles were calling us to request more recycling bins.  By the end of the school year, we had installed more than 200 recycling bins across 8 area schools and a community park!

With building momentum and increasing requests for recycling bins, we decided to carry the Recycling in Our Schools program into this school year, with the help of our State Farm YAB grant.  We started our the year by providing 6 new recycling bins to Morgantown High School to help continue their recycling program and help meet their recycling needs.  Throughout October and November, we prepared for and presented our program to the Monongalia County Board of Education (our school district).  At this meeting, we showcased our accomplishments and proposed a partnership and administrative support from our school board to expand and sustainably establish a recycling program for all our local schools.  Although the school board was unable to directly accept our proposal, we agreed to establish a collaborative “Recyling in Our Schools” committee that would bring together members of our community to begin working toward sustainable recycling programs in our schools.

To continue our YAB-led program and goals for recycling in our schools, our plan for this year is to branch out to area elementary schools.   Most recently, we installed 6 bins at Kingwood Elementary.  In the coming months, our YAB members will be contacting the principals of other elementary schools to determine schools needs for recycling and setting up deliveries of their recycling bins.  Stay tuned for our progress!

November - Reflections on our projects to come…

After receiving our grant from State Farm Youth Advisory Board (YAB), our October and November monthly Youth Advisory Board meetings became all about planning and devising a game plan for our upcoming projects.  We are so excited to be able to launch our projects into the community, but we definitely have our work cut out for us!  So, we took the opportunity in our meetings to reflect on each of our roles in the coming school year on our projects.  For the coming months, we have three major projects we will be launching in our community, which will be followed by our team-buildling and reflection retreat, and our community outreach symposium.  At our meetings, we discussed each of our projects and the goals we wanted to set for them.  Our upcoming projects include Recycling in Our Schools, the Youth-led Watershed Bill of Rights program, and our first annual Ed-Venture Challenge.

Here are some excerpts from our journal reflections on our upcoming projects:

Nathan – “I can’t decide if I’m excited about our upcoming projects or nervous, especially about going into high school classrooms and teaching students about watersheds.  I think that teaching these students and sending them out into the community to monitor streams will be a constructive project because we might get samples from places that nobody has ever sampled before.  That would be good because we might discover that if we managed to clean one certain area, it might affect the rest of our watershed like we never imagined.”

Liam N. – “I would say that my role in these projects would be to help with our service projects, instead of with presentations… presentations make me nervous.  I think that with these big projects, it is important to remember that our Youth Advisory Board and Friends of Deckers Creek matter to the community and make a difference.  We help our environment!  Remembering this will help us to accomplish our goals, even when we might be nervous.”

Emerson – “I amd looking forward to teaching high school students about watersheds and how to use water quality probes to monitor our streams.  I hope that we can teach them all about the water and how we have an impact on it in our community.  I hope that I can help them see this and teach them how to help our community and make it a better place for all of us to live.  Our recycling program and our watershed program will have a huge impact on the community.”

Liam D. – “I think my role will be to help with our recycling program.  I want to help more schools, stores, parks, and really any places in our community get recycling programs started. “