Students explore Breakneck Creek through school backyard program
Mars Area School District students aren't afraid to get their feet wet.
Every Friday from the beginning of the school year in September until the end of October, high school AP Biology students escort classes of curious fifth graders into the local ecosystem in their backyard: Breakneck Creek.
The expeditions are part of the Mars Area Water Protection Program, a team-up between teachers, local environmental firms and students to get children out in nature and learning about the complex natural world beneath the surface of local waterways.
Students get the chance to do physical, chemical and biological testing in Breakneck Creek, and data from their work is shared with the Breakneck Creek Regional Authority. The project has been a part of Mars Area School District curriculum for more than 20 years, and gives older students in science classes the chance to work directly with younger students to explore the natural world.
“Our biggest goal is awareness,” said Bill Wesley, an Advanced Placement Biology teacher at Mars Area High School. “We do teach a lot of particulars, but ... most of us don't think twice about when we flush our toilets: Where does it go? If you're aware of it, then later in your life it's more likely you might take some action if you hear of something going on. We only have so much water on planet Earth.”Wesley started the program in 1995 with the dual goal of introducing children to collecting real environmental data in local streams and facilitating mentorship between high schoolers and Centennial School students.“One of the cool things is the interaction when we have older kids teaching younger kids,” Wesley said. “When kids are in AP Bio at the high school, most of them now at this point will readily raise their hands if I say, 'Do you remember back in fifth grade when you went stream testing?' Now they're like, 'Now we get to be the instructors.'”Wesley said that the inter-grade portion of the program helps keep students engaged with what they're learning.“They take it more serious then, and feel like they're doing an important job,” he said. “The fifth graders look up to them. When you were a little fifth grader, a kid in high school is like an adult, and one step below a hero, you know? They're listening to what they have to say, and that part and that dynamic is really neat.”There's no shortage of excitement either way — when children are at the stream, Wesley gets them singing songs, shouting out answers to questions and eagerly looking for wildlife.“Going in and out of all the streams and rocks, and slippy stuff, and mucka-wucka, somebody could have the possibility of getting hurt,” he instructs a group of gathered fifth graders. “It's all about what today?”“Safety!” they reply all at once.
Mars Area Centennial School teacher Bill Sepich said the opportunity to get out of the classroom and into nature makes the stream study program a “highlight” for many fifth graders.“They enjoy the interaction with it,” he said. “When you talk about pollution and keeping the environment clean, you can talk about it all you want versus seeing what they're able to do with it. That's the key part of that, when they are able to see that it is important and see the species that live there.”He said that the fifth graders particularly enjoy working with the high schoolers.“For some of them, it's their brother or sister (teaching), so it's kind of cool,” he said. “Anything that gets them out of the classroom environment and interacting, they enjoy.”
Wesley said the high schoolers in his classes often remember the day they went to do stream testing as fifth graders. In one of his classes, some of them still recalled the song the group sang at the creek bank — ”ooh, watershed, water water shed” while clapping and stomping their feet — several years down the line.“I remember having so much fun with it as a kid,” said Piper Coffield, a junior at Mars Area High School. “When we were in fifth grade, we came down just like the kids are coming down today.”“We teach the younger kids, and they carry it on,” said Cecelia Joliat, a senior in AP Biology at Mars high school.“We test the water and make sure it's healthy around the area, and we give all the results to the Breakneck water authority,” she said. “Just getting to help in the community and see the water, and to see everything is healthy around here, I think it's cool.”Carol Wack, a teacher at Mars Area High School, leads the high school AP Biology students to instruct the fifth graders to gather wildlife, plant and water samples in the stream.“It is a neat cross-curricular thing,” Wack said. She points out a patch of multiflora rose along the stream, an invasive plant common in Pennsylvania.Wack hopes that the program will be continued after she and other teachers running the program eventually retire.“We've been here a long time,” she said. “I don't know who's going to run the program. I don't know who's going to take it up.”
On certain days as part of the program, children get to meet local environmental researchers and consultants who do stream testing and other observations as part of their everyday work.On Friday, biologists Dan Maltese and Mike Shema of Civil and Environmental Consultants brought along equipment used to temporarily shock small fish with electricity, so that they could be scooped up in nets.“It's kind of whatever we catch, we can tell the story of that fish,” Maltese said.High school students put on rubber wading pants and helped them catch the fish to be put in containers for the fifth graders to observe.“We started off doing career day in Mars High School 18, 19 years ago, and that turned into this,” Maltese said. “We wanted to actually show them physically what we do for a living. It went from showing them what you do on the screen to showing them what you do in the field.”Maltese and Shema hold up a fish swimming in a clear container, and the children cluster around and ask questions.“The kids are always so nice, and so interested,” Maltese said. “We always say the best day in the office is a day in the field.”“It is really rewarding coming out here,” Shema said. “There's a lot of excitement.”
