Stroud Educators at Work Leaf Pack: Linking Kids to their Environment and Community Forest Grove Community School is a special place — a public charter school in Oregon where student projects are connected to both community and place, and where hands-on experience is considered the best way to learn. In this kind of environment, it’s not surprising that a group of fourth, fifth and sixth graders equipped with the Leaf Pack Experiment Kit could have an impact on a community — or that nine to twelve year old kids could be enthralled by nature and connected to their environment, at a time when “nature deficit disorder” has become a part of the daily lexicon.
 
Charlie Graham teaches all subjects, including science, at Forest Grove Community School. By all accounts he’s no ordinary teacher. After 20-years in the public school system, his enthusiasm for this charter school and his students is palpable. He takes his job seriously and gets genuine enjoyment from watching his students connect the dots and understand their relationship to the environment. So, it’s no wonder that he is a fan of the Leaf Pack Experiment Kit. “I love that it provides an authentic learning experience,” he said, “and exposes my students directly to the scientific process.” An added benefit is the validation that comes with uploading and sharing data with other schools around the world through the web-based Leaf Pack Network®.
 
Listening to Graham share the vision for his latest Leaf Pack project — a partnership with local sustainable timber company Hyla Woods, which seeks to prove that logging practices can be both sustainable and profitable — peeked our curiosity.
 
Hyla Woods has been in business for generations. Situated 40 miles west of Portland in the North Oregon Coast Range and the nearby town of Vernonia, the land on which it sits and the community surrounding it experienced problems as a result of two so-called 100-year floods in 11 years — the first in 1996 and another in December of 2007. These events had a devastating impact on the local community — wiping out schools, disrupting basic services, damaging homes and the local freshwater ecosystem. Hyla Woods, in cooperation with the Watershed Council, conservation non-profits, local businesses, universities and schools, worked to restore and enhance the ecological diversity of the creek and surrounding forests — building upon work the timber company had begun in 1986, long before the floods occurred.
 
MONITORING THE HEALTH OF LOUSIGNONT CREEK
Charlie Graham and Hyla Woods proprietor, Peter Hayes, decided to take the reforestation project one step further — bringing the classroom out of doors, and enabling local students to engage in a long-term scientific experiment to monitor Lousignont Creek, one of the headwaters of the Nehalem, which runs directly through Hyla Woods and is important habitat for coho salmon, steelhead, and the species on which they depend. Students are testing the hypothesis that improving the streamside forest and conducting sustainable logging practices, will yield a healthier river ecosystem with tangible benefits to both the natural ecosystem and the hard-hit community. Said Hayes of the partnership, “This cooperation provides a good opportunity to reach the twin goals of educating and energizing kids and enhancing community health through a single action.”
 
Peter Hayes, a conservationist and educator himself, has been a tremendous advocate of the program. It seems a perfect fit with his family-owned business which operates three Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified forests in the northern Oregon Coast Range. The company monitors and guides its sustainability efforts by tracking its impact on the forest with annual bird counts, which it recently expanded to include indicators focused on amphibians, water temperatures, and macroinvertebrates.
 
SHARING THE RESULTS
Hayes joined the kids in the fall of 2008 in the Lousignont as they conducted their first Leaf Pack experiments and collected macroinvertebrate data as an indicator of creek health. Students have continued their efforts with another visit to Hyla Woods this spring and they will compare the new data with the baseline data they’ve already established, as well as with future data collected over the next several years.
 
“The Leaf Pack Tool is a manageable way for teachers and students to help us answer an important question — namely, is the creek healthy,” said Hayes, noting that, “Leaf Pack is helping students reach essential educational goals by doing real and important work.”  And that, in addition to spending a day in the woods, was what really excited 11-year old, Nathaniel Torry-Schrag, known by his friends as Natty. “I just love the outdoors, and the fact that we were helping someone take water quality measurements made it seem like we had more of a purpose. I definitely thought it was a lot of fun,” said this 5th grader and author of Salmon Come from the Sun, a book about the Hyla Woods project and the Leaf Pack experiment.
 
Forest Grove Community School students’ data will be blended with the data of other researchers from Oregon State University and Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality to create an overall picture of creek health — and the results will be visible to all.

Links:
Learn more about Stroud Water Research Center’s Education programs for children at:
http://www.stroudcenter.org/education/students.htm

Check out the results and a photographic Project Journal from the Forest Grove Community School’s Hyla Woods Project on the Leaf Pack Network® at:
http://www.stroudcenter.org/lpn/projectdata.asp?Project=622

For more information about Forest Grove Community School go to:
http://www.fgcschool.org/

For more information about sustainable timber company, Hyla Woods, go to:
http://www.hylawoods.com

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