n October 1990 Bud Rockey’s ninth-grade science class at nearby Upland Country Day School placed leaf packs — small mesh bags filled with tree leaves — in White Clay Creek.

"The reason we were interested in doing this experiment," wrote Jessica Small, a student, in her final report, "is because before man settled on this continent, streams flowed mostly through the forest and leaves were an important food source for the animals living there. Large quantities of these leaves fell in the streams. Over the years man has removed most of the trees from along the streams. If man keeps on removing the trees, the animals that specialize in eating the stream-borne leaves will die because there will not be a sufficient food source. Man is now also introducing foreign trees into our environment. We do not know if the stream animals are eating the foreign tree leaves or whether they can digest them." The students sought to find the answers to such questions by monitoring the packets they put in the stream .

Thus was born the education program at the Stroud Center, and since then thousands of students and their teachers have put on rubber boots and waded into White Clay Creek to explore a hidden world of insects, snails, crayfish and worms beneath the water’s surface. The leaf packs they study are the descendants of the ones Robin Vannote developed in the first days of the Center and that Stroud scientists continue to use in their experiments. The students, in other words, do real science.

The program evolved from Bern Sweeney’s belief that the declining interest he encountered while teaching college science and ecology courses stemmed from a lack of stimulating science in high school. "We need to get to students in a new way," he told Ensley Fairman of the Longwood Foundation, which provided seed money for the program. "We want to open our doors to the public and broaden the way we convey our knowledge of stream and river ecosystems." To that end, he proposed to make Stroud research the basis for educating a broad spectrum of students and to expand the Center’s role in education beyond the courses the scientists taught at local universities.

The programs are for anyone who wants to learn about streams, rivers and their watersheds.

• To reach schools that are unable to get to a stream, Stroud educators bring traveling, hands-on programs directly into the classroom.
• To serve as a resource for teachers, the education staff launched a summer institute in 1995. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the institute enables middle-school teachers to design field projects based on stream research and curricular needs.
• Hundreds of adults have attended the Stroud Stream School, and its graduates now watch over rivers and streams throughout the region.
• The Center sponsors public lectures throughout the year and conducts outreach programs and workshops for community groups.

The staff does these things because they believe that exposure to the work of Stroud scientists will excite students of all ages, help improve science education, disseminate knowledge about freshwater ecosystems and enhance the stewardship of watersheds.