(education)

Photos by Kevin Keith

Passing the Test

Pennsylvania middle schoolers, mucking about in streams, have made a great discovery: Studying the environment is not only interesting, it improves the world around them and their grades, too.

By Jennifer Bogo

Something was very wrong with muddy run. the amount of dissolved oxygen in the creek's water was zero, the macroinvertebrate diversity was low, and the nitrate levels were high—all indications of severe pollution. A sample sent for testing confirmed the presence of coliform bacteria, most likely from breaks in an aging sewer system. The Huntingdon Area Middle School sixth graders who discovered the hazard were intrigued—and appalled.

That creek happened to be adjacent to school grounds. Many of the students grew up playing in its waters, just as their sisters and brothers still do. After calling the attention of the town borough to the problem, they received a polite "Thanks." The borough didn't have the money to fix the sewer, so the students decided to get it themselves.

They spent three years writing to the Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) expressing their environmental and health concerns. The persistence finally paid off. The borough was awarded a $250,000 grant and a $750,000 low-interest loan to repair the broken sewer lines.

When the students took their first water sample it was 1992. Ten years later kids in this rural central Pennsylvania town are still monitoring the creek, as well as three others. The data they gather is now written up in a 50-page assessment that goes straight to the DEP as part of the state's effort to evaluate all of its 83,000 miles of waterways by 2006. The students are receiving good grades from state officials, and from their teachers. After all, for them this is just part of class.

Huntingdon has learned what other schools across the country are only beginning to discover: The environment can be used to teach just about any subject, and it can motivate and engage students in ways that more traditional education often cannot. Exploring the world outside the classroom neatly fuses together subjects rather than keeping them apart. As a result, academic lessons that once seemed irrelevant suddenly become very meaningful to the students' lives.

As part of the sixth-grade program called STREAMS (Science Teams in Rural Environments for Aquatic Management Studies), students study a local stream from its headwaters to its mouth. They learn its ecology, collect and crunch data, measure human impacts, and communicate findings.

Before she entered the team-taught program, "nothing really connected," says Caitie Hanlon, a junior at Huntingdon Area High School. "Classes were just math, English, and social studies. But in STREAMS, we would go to math and calculate the flow of water or the area of a streambed; in English, write a report about it; and in social studies, learn how what we were doing here was affecting people downstream. The classes are more cooperative, and that keeps kids focused better. We don't have to change gears so quickly."

Students learn much more effectively within this framework than within a traditionally compartmentalized education, according to the State Education & Environment Roundtable (SEER), a consortium of 16 state education agencies. The organization studied 40 schools across the country that use the environment as the basis for an interdisciplinary education—a model for school reform it calls Environment as an Integrating Context, or EIC—although each does so in its own way.

Students at Wheatley Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky, studied the behavior and distribution of white-tailed deer at Blackacre State Nature Reserve, for instance. Waldo Middle School students in Salem, Oregon, created endangered-species recovery plans that they then presented to professionals from local agencies and zoos. In Colorado, Glenwood Springs High School students worked with architects to design a pedestrian mall along the Colorado River. They submitted their plan to the city council, and it's now a reality.

SEER's report, "Closing the Achievement Gap," surveyed teachers to compare EIC-taught students with their traditionally taught peers. Of the educators surveyed, 92 percent reported that EIC students had improved math skills; 94 percent reported they were more successful in communicating with others; 97 percent reported students could more effectively apply social studies skills to real-world situations; 97 percent reported stronger problem-solving and strategic-thinking skills; and 100 percent reported that science was learned better.

Fourteen of the study schools, including Huntingdon, used standardized test scores and grade-point averages to validate the success of their programs. They found that, compared with peers, the students taught by environment-based education performed consistently better in reading, writing, math, science, and social studies.

"STREAMS gives meaning to why the students do what they do," says Jill Adams, who was the principal of Huntingdon Area Middle School when its program started. "When they get so intimately involved with a project they've generated," she says, "they have a stake in making it the best that they can. We saw student abilities to read, write, and calculate all increase, because they became so totally immersed in what they were doing."

Lera Tsayukova crouches like a catcher in the center of Shaver Creek, 21 miles north of Huntingdon. The icy March water ripples over wet rocks and against her rubber waders, a man's size six and way too big for her slight sixth-grade frame. Her long brown hair falls over the sleeves of her red fleece, and she smiles broadly, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

"Ehhhhh, batter, batter!" her social studies teacher, Fred Wilson, calls from his perch on a large rock upstream. He tweaks his maroon wastewater-treatment-plant ball cap, a prize from his favorite field trip, and pitches a Ping-Pong ball into the current to measure its speed. This information will later be used to calculate the volume of water flowing on to a major river.

The ball shoots down the creek, bouncing and bobbing, to Lera, who stretches her hands and makes a perfect catch.

"Got it!"

Wilson clicks a stopwatch. He wears two slung around his neck like whistles, a habit left over, perhaps, from his days as a high school wrestling coach.

Just a few yards away, Kaleigh Felisberto, a seventh grader wearing tinted green glasses, kicks at the streambed in an exaggerated, and very wet, version of the twist. The ankles of her jeans are soaked clear through, but in her quest to loosen macroinvertebrates from the creek's muddy bottom into a waiting net, that doesn't seem to matter.

The net is spread out over the twig-littered shore, and five bent heads nearly meet over the middle. Rapid-fire, they start calling out what they find. "Water penny!" "Midge!" Seventh grader Margo Wilson's two ponytails flop forward; suddenly she sits upright, holding a squirmy brown larva between two fingers. "Dragonfly!" she shouts. "Taxa 2."

"Atta girl!" says Wilson.

By measuring such things as water flow and macroinvertebrate diversity, the students can project an accurate picture of the stream's health. And they get to make a bit of a splash.

Environmental topics are particularly conducive to hands-on work, team projects, group discussions, and field trips, and so they mesh with a wide range of skills and learning styles. This may explain why SEER found that student behavior, attendance, and attitude improved as well. Although at the time of the study, sixth graders in Huntingdon's STREAMS program included a mixed 17 percent of students in that grade (now every sixth grader goes through STREAMS), they caused only 1 percent of its disciplinary incidents.

"It's a strategy that works with all students, regardless of learning disabilities or behavioral problems," says Mary M. Smith, an educator for 23 years who is now with Audubon field support. "Instead of telling students to 'sit still and be quiet,' put those students in a rich environment and there are more ways for them to relate to their education."

Consequently, the environment is a valuable tool for meeting the rigorous goals outlined in new national education policy. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires states to develop plans to improve student achievement. Students must now meet challenging academic standards in reading, math, and—starting in 2006—science, or their schools risk the loss of federal funding.

Pressure to "perform" may cause some schools to be reluctant to undertake projects that don't relate directly to the three R's. But there is an opportunity for teachers, like those at Huntingdon, who make the case that the environment actually boosts overall academic performance, and does so with students of differing ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and ability.

"We integrate the environment into subject areas to enhance teaching," says Karen Harris, principal of Perry Hall Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland, "so that the students can learn state and county standards in a deeper, more meaningful way." Lessons have been delivered by creating a rain garden, growing bay grasses, starting a recycling program, and building artificial oyster reefs. Perry Hall is an EIC school as well as one of nine Chesapeake Bay schools that use the environment as the main theme for all instruction.

After Hawley Environmental Elementary School in Milwaukee chose the environment as its focus, all of its third-grade students passed the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test, compared with only 25 percent of the total Milwaukee public school population. "Environment-based Education," a report by the National Environmental Education & Training Foundation, lists other examples as well: Isaac Dickson Elementary School in Asheville, North Carolina, integrated gardening and a nature trail into its curriculum, and fourth-grade students saw a 31-percentage-point increase in math achievement in just one year.

Back at Huntingdon, in the overstuffed social studies classroom, Wilson enthusiastically pulls out display posters that are covered with student projects, on soil composition, water chemistry, and insect life. "There's nothing more interesting to a kid than the out-of-doors," he says."They live there, they understand it. With the environment, they get to study things that are important to them, apply it in their lives, and, hopefully, pass it along."

And pass it along they have. The program has come a long way from its original status as "study hall." Fancy engraved plaques line the shelves above Wilson's desk. A recent award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is displayed next to ones from the governor of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Wildlife Federation, the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and the Juniata Valley Audubon Society.

Wilson takes down a certificate in a plain glass frame. "This is the most important one," he says. In pen and ink it proclaims "sincere appreciation … for helping to make our neighborhood more beautiful and for helping to keep our homes safe from flooding. We will forever be grateful.—The Neighbors of Warm Spring Acres."

To alleviate the storm-water runoff they had first detected in Muddy Run, the students decided to build a wetlands on school property. They sold T-shirts and solicited donations to raise money, and then partnered with local government agencies to help design and build it. When they received a national award for that project, the students took the prize money and used it to build a swale, stabilized by trees and shrubs, to further reduce chronic flooding in the homes adjacent to the creek. They made presentations at town meetings, wrote to newspapers, and created and delivered a brochure to more than 400 residences, educating the public about how they, too, could help reduce runoff.

"Because of the curriculum the teachers have developed, the kids have a greater knowledge of the issues in their community than the adults do," says Andy Patterson, manager of the Huntingdon County Conservation District. "It's really exciting that one day they'll be sitting on borough councils and boards and be better at it than we are."

The real benefit of environmental education, after all, is not found only in test scores but in young citizens who are capable of thinking, communicating, and acting effectively within an increasingly complex society. They are becoming leaders even before they become adults. Huntingdon is just one example, but an excellent one. Beyond understanding and appreciating the world around them, the students there have improved it.

"People were thankful because, in a lot of ways, we were helping them to stop pollution of a local stream, prevent basement flooding, or just learn about what's in their own backyard," says Hanlon, who, like many Huntingdon students, continued with environmental service projects long after her sixth-grade year. "And they were genuinely surprised by what children so young could accomplish. They thought it must be a fluke," she says. "But each year we learn from past experiences and get new information. Each year just keeps getting better."