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Kids Trade Places to Learn Restoration
Rabekkuh O’Neil balances precariously on a flat rock, trying to avoid getting her feet wet in the cold water of Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek while making notes on a pad she’s holding. Crouched beside her is Akwoung Saechao, who shivers a bit as he dips his hand in the stream to pick a random pebble out of the water. The two then carefully measure the rock with a small plastic ruler. As O’Neil writes the measurements down on her notepad, Saechao reaches down for another specimen.
It’s very unlikely that these two ever would have met, especially in such a setting—Saechao is a student at Richmond High, a big, inner-city school just a few miles away from the creek, while O’Neil attends Clearwater Valley High School, located in tiny Kooskia, Idaho (pop. 782). But they are participating in a unique exchange program aimed at opening their eyes to the possibilities of a career helping the environment.
The program, in its fourth year, is the brainchild of Ann Riley, head of Berkeley’s Waterways Restoration Institute, and Peter Goodwin, a civil engineering professor at the University of Idaho, Boise. Each year, several students and teachers are selected from Richmond and the Clearwater Valley area, both low-income areas where educational opportunities are generally limited. First, the Idaho group is taken to Berkeley. Along with their urban counterparts, they learn about stream restoration techniques, such as surveying and pebble counts (which tell how much sediment the stream is moving), and about water-quality monitoring. Then, led by Mark Spencer, one of the project’s coordinators, they apply their knowledge to a real-life urban creek restoration project on Wildcat Creek in Richmond.
After about a week, everyone piles into a van for a drive to Boise, and a 33-mile backpacking trek into the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Camped there, the students will use what they learned in Berkeley, as well as new techniques, to measure the progress of restoration work being done along rural waterways. The data they gather in both states will be forwarded to researchers and used in the ongoing evaluation of their projects.
The program is funded by the National Science Foundation and supplemented by local sources. Upon completion, each student receives a $1,000 stipend, as well as a $1,000 college scholarship. Students also do follow-up work with the program staff and teachers at their schools. Riley and Goodwin both note proudly that most of their students have gone on to college.
The waterways they are exploring are quite different. As the kids get ready to fish pebbles out of Strawberry Creek, an instructor warns them to avoid glass and needles that might be lurking among the rocks. The Idaho rivers aren’t pristine, either—they’ve long been degraded by grazing and mining—but despite that, a good salmon run is underway this year. Students may get a chance to snorkel and have a face-to-face encounter with a migrating Chinook.
Some of the Idaho students have never visited a city with more than a few thousand people in it, and a few, including O’Neil, had never seen the ocean before they came west for the program. The city kids have an equally novel experience awaiting them—exploring deep canyons instead of busy streets, and being surrounded by bird and animal calls instead of engines and sirens.
At the beginning of the program, says the Urban Creeks Council’s Josh Bradt, one of the instructors, "we usually see a lot of gentle ribbing of the Idaho kids by the city kids." There’s a payback time when they head out into the wilderness, but Bradt says that by the end, many of the students have become fast friends. "I think the cultural exchange is really important." O’B
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