MWEE

Launch of Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences Program for Goose Creek Watershed Students K-12

The Goose Creek region has been fortunate to have a dedicated and remarkably successful corps of leaders to preserve the area’s natural resources, water quality, and agricultural landscape. Maintaining that success, however, depends on a continuum of leadership that needs to begin early in life. Encouraging children’s natural curiosity with hands-on experience with the wonders of our rivers, streams, and landscapes is key to the development of leaders for tomorrow’s environmental challenges.

The Chesapeake Bay region is rich with educational programs that focus on water quality made available by Conservation Districts; Virginia’s Departments of Conservation, Game and Inland Fisheries, and Environmental Quality; Chesapeake Bay Back Pack; The Nature Conservancy; Trout Unlimited; Isaac Walton League; and many others. Each program is explicitly aligned with required standards of learning. Current in-school offerings of such experiences vary greatly, and no single organization has assumed a leadership role in relating these programs to where students live —in this case, the Goose Creek Watershed.

Many residents in non-coastal communities within the Chesapeake Bay watershed are raising objections to improving water quality under the current EPA guidelines, arguing that their contributions to the Bay are minimal. We propose to emphasize the connectedness of all watersheds and how improving local water quality benefits local communities as well as the Bay. We propose to do this by creating and administering a targeted, locally-based watershed education program paralleling the Meaningful Watershed Education Experience Program undertaken by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We believe this is the first such program to be applied to a specific watershed.

GCA is proposing the launch of this project for consideration by the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Advisory Commititteee. Covering a one-year period, the launch would involve development of a partnership with one or more area schools’ science teachers to create a Standards of Learning- compatible, inquiry-based curriculum built around identification of the watersheds in the local community and field trips to nearby streams to learn about the local watershed, to measure water quality, and to recognize erosion; and ways to preserve or change the condition of a stream or river. The sophistication of the field trip and other activities would be tailored to the student groups’ learning levels.