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Watering the Gardens of Young Minds

What do worm boxes and butterflies have to do with water quality? A lot, if you ask any teacher or student participating in Aquatic Outreach Institute's new Kids in Gardens program - the latest among half-a-dozen teacher and citizen education programs that together recently earned Institute founder Kathy Kramer a national award.

Kids in Gardens came about this spring when the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District decided to beef up public education directed at reducing the amount of diazinon and chlorpyrifos - common garden pesticides - washing into storm drains and sanitary sewers. "We thought the Institute's programs were a good way to get the message out to a lot of people," says Harriet Heibel with Central San. "Plus, gardens are more attractive to teachers and students than sewage."

In the Kids in Gardens workshops, teachers learn about natural approaches to pest management and how to create bird and butterfly gardens in their schoolyards, using mostly native plants. Teachers also build worm boxes and learn how to plan organic school gardens, all in an effort to discourage reliance on chemicals. Leslie Graham, a school gardener and teacher's aide at Danville's Montclair Elementary, who attended the workshops, holds weekly gardening sessions with second graders. She tries to get kids thinking right away about how to manage pests. "We have a zucchini seedling right now that something's eaten," she explains. "When the kids ask what happened, I try to get them thinking about options other than running down to the hardware store and buying every chemical on the shelf."

Can programs for kids really reduce pesticide runoff when adults are usually the ones using the bad stuff? "The kids model the behavior," says the Institute's Debi Tidd, who helped develop the program. "If you have 30 kids in a class, that's 60 parents who will be impacted. The kids go home and say, 'look what we did in school today'."

Kids in Gardens follows in the footsteps of the Institute's better-known Kids in Creeks and Kids in Marshes workshops (800 teachers in three counties have participated in the former since 1992). In all three types of workshops, teachers learn how to find remnant patches of habitat in their neighborhoods and to use these nearby areas as outdoor classrooms, in which students can conduct stream surveys, clean up creeks, or keep journals of species found in the area, among many other activities.

For these and other Institute activities - including launching and staffing two community-based creek programs in which local citizens learn the impacts of everyday activities on Bay Area watersheds, and help restore them - Kramer recently won national recognition. At a Capitol Hill ceremony this April, four federal environmental agencies and the Environmental Law Institute bestowed her with a National Wetlands Award for excellence in education and outreach. "This year's award recipients represent that great tradition of cooperative approaches to conservation," said U.S. Fish & Wildlife's Jamie Rappaport Clark at the ceremony.

Contact: Kathy Kramer (510)231-9507 or Harriet Heibel (510)228-9500

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