2003-2004
"I liken most high school education to a donut. It's missing the center, the chance for students to apply their minds to issues that really matter, to practice skills they truly need to be successful, to turn their idealism into action." —Bernice Fedestin, Brighton High School '05, Brighton, MA
ADVICE AND RESOURCES
2004-2005
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Project Summary From the Salmon Recovery Project Team at Central High School A scientifically rigorous study is now the organizing principle that is bringing agencies, students, and citizens together in common work. The goals of this work are: a growing and publicly accessible database of water quality information, the infrastructure to test hypotheses, a conservation culture that arises from the eye-opening nature of this work, and growing populations of Atlantic salmon (and other native sea-run fishes) who call the Kenduskeag watershed home. Students are currently fulfilling a contractual obligation to generate water quality data from 5 sampling sites on 6 sampling dates over a twelve-month period. The opportunities for relevant, rigorous, student-centered learning, and for community and professional involvement in school are ripe, even bending the branch. School structures are hard to change. But we are building a new model for learning that has young people working with diverse professionals to solve a real problem. We are at a critical point in the process of designing something new. Additional comments (from teacher, Ed Lindsay) Over the course of the year, we identified a central need in the various efforts to re-establish salmon populations: the generation of reliable water quality data and its dissemination to agencies and the public. We established ongoing partnerships with professionals at agencies and scientists the University of Maine. We are producing water quality data according to a study of our own design that will allow the tributaries of the Kenduskeag watershed that are important as salmon habitat to be compared and that will allow for a correlation of land use and water chemistry. We have leveraged two other sources of funding for the project, totaling $28,000. They have allowed us to expand and deepen our water quality testing and to become full partners with local scientists in monitoring the Kenduskeag watershed. One student who graduated this year is now working for the project this summer: she’s at a course learning GIS mapping until July 2 and then will work with the Atlantic Salmon Commission’s computer person to arrange our data so that it can be easily integrated into the Atlantic Salmon Commission’s existing database. This is a multi-year undertaking. The incoming chemistry class will once again carry the project through the next year. My goal for this summer is to design the curriculum to be learned through this place-based work. During the upcoming school year, I want to work with my students to conceive, design, and carry out additional, unique investigations that use the Kenduskeag watershed as the laboratory, and to assemble the tools, infrastructure, and expertise required to carry them out.
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