From Pre-K to graduation, students can enjoy and study the way water moves through swales, marshes and creeks on the OES campus. The following article, which first appeared in the OES magazine, describes how students study and protect the two wetlands that cover a third of the 59-acre Oregon Episcopal School campus.

On a fall day, kindergartners traipse around the shore of the pond off Nicol Road. They look at ducklings following their momma into the reeds. They examine a path through the grass and guess what critters might sneak along it come nightfall. They listen to the squishy sound their boots make when they go near the water.

The trip, traditionally led by Lower School computer and science specialist Lou Paff, is the first experience most of the children have with the 16-acre wetlands on the north edge of campus. In the spring, both kindergarten and pre-K students will visit the 4.5-acre Woods Creek wetland at the other end of campus behind the Sports and Recreation Complex. In succeeding years, they will visit the wetlands many times, often as part of class work, sometimes for independent research, or occasionally purely for pleasure.

In Lower School, outings to the wetlands usually have a particular goal. One year David Goodman-Farley’s class built a bridge at the Woods Creek wetland, and Karen Carrithers’ fifth-graders recently studied ducks at the pond with ornithologist Shoaib Tareen, the parent of a boy in her class. In Middle School, students really get their feet wet, figuratively and sometimes literally, during seventh grade science. Taught by Angela Hancock and Joan Grimm, the seventh-grade science curriculum focuses on earth systems, including how wetlands affect water quality, plants and animals.

In September the seventh-graders visit the wetlands and measure the temperature of the water and the amount of dissolved oxygen. They collect samples and take them back to the lab where they determine the level of nitrates and phosphates and measure the acidity of the water. Then they put the samples under a microscope and try to identify the microorganisms they see there.

In later units they study the water cycle, the properties of water, and erosion. A couple of times a month they return to the wetlands to see the effects of the changing seasons. Then, on a warm day in May they go to the wetlands without any thermometers or collection bottles. Angela wants them to experience the wetlands in another way, in a less empirical manner. Last May, the outing had a tremendous impact on her students.

“It was spring,” she said, “and we just went back to look at our wetlands – by then we called it ‘our’ wetlands. When we got to the dock overlooking the pond I had my seventh-graders be quiet for three minutes. More than just not talking. Don’t move. Inside, let’s just be quiet and listen. They totally got into it. We went all around the wetlands to the wooded section, the marshy section, the overgrown blackberries, to Fanno Creek.”

When they got back, somebody said, “Did you see the trash in Fanno Creek? Somebody should do something about that.” Others talked about the beauty they had seen or how they had felt when all was quiet.

“It was so cool to hear all the animals and let the whole experience sink in,” said one girl in the class. “That was one of the best days we had down there. It was a moment to collect yourself and think how lucky we were to have something like that.”

The enthusiasm of the students quickly bubbled over into a passion to do something for the wetlands: Pick up trash. Yank out invasive blackberry bushes. Improve the trails. Angela said she would devote class time to work in the wetlands if the students planned and executed the activities. The students got right to work, and were soon wet, muddy, and scratched by blackberry thorns. They even waded into the creek to remove boards and bottles.
“The kids were working with smiles on their faces,” Angela said. “There were times when they spontaneously stopped and shouted, ‘This is so great!’ and then got back into it again.”

After the cleanup, they were pleased with the work they had done, but they feared it would not last.

“They spent so much time cleaning up the wetlands, but then they said, the trash is just going to build up again unless we do something to educate people about the wetlands,” Angela said. The time had come to tell the world.
Again, the students made a plan. They would organize a Wetlands Awareness Night. They would get a speaker, do a PowerPoint slide show, read poetry, explain the gifts a wetland provides. But who would come? They needed to design a leaflet, distribute it, encourage people to attend the presentation. They divided up the responsibilities, and within two weeks they had done it all, including going door to door in the Montclair neighborhood and personally inviting residents to attend. A speaker came from Clean Water Services, which was just beginning a major wetlands enhancement project on the OES marsh funded by its ratepayers. Several students spoke, describing the work they had done, explaining the problems facing the wetlands, and extolling the beauty of what the marshland is and does.

“We had seating for 40,” Angela said. “All the chairs were full and people were sitting on the floor and standing in the back.”

The success of Wetlands Awareness Night further whetted some students’ interest in wetlands. At OES, passions often morph into science projects, and that is the case with Katie V. '08. She did her seventh-grade science project on water filtration, and last spring she began her eighth-grade project on creating a wetland to filter out contaminants from the street runoff in her neighborhood that eventually ends up in Fanno Creek.

Her seventh-grade project stemmed from her curiosity about “the big orangesock thingies” that had been placed near storm drains on her street to filter runoff. Working with other students, she tested different filter materials such as leaves and Zeolite, and also constructed a simulated wetland to compare its effectiveness as a filter. They were able to determine that the wetland was superior to the other filters but weren’t able to accurately quantify the difference because of difficulty with the testing instruments.

This year Katie is back with a better nitrate probe, a more realistic wetland, and the help of her sister Jenni '10. Runoff from their street runs through her side yard and they wanted to create a swale in her backyard – until they found out they would need a $2000 permit for that. Instead they planted the storm drainage ditch in their yard with native bulrushes and sedges to help remove nutrients. They built a sedimentation tank in a 32-gallon trash can, and they are currently constructing a raised bed, with the same native plants, to treat a portion of the drainage water that will be pumped up to the bed using the force of the water flow through the ditch. They began building the setup last summer and have been testing the runoff for nitrates, ammonium, suspended solids, and toxic metals.

“Having all summer to collect the background data made it a lot easier,” she said. “It’s really fun. This is what I like to do in my spare time.”

Although students like Katie may do independent research, their next class work on the wetlands occurs in chemistry, usually taken during the sophomore year. Rosa Hemphill and Rob Orr send their students on monthly trips to 17 sites in the wetlands on Nicol Road, at Fanno Creek, and at Woods Creek, which flows behind SPARC. At each site, students record water temperature, air temperature, and dissolved oxygen in the water. They take samples to the chemistry lab and test them at two water quality lab stations with probes for nitrates, pH, ammonium, and turbidity. They also use test kits to measure phosphates and ammonia, and all the results are recorded in lab notebooks.

Beginning this year, the data from the chemistry classes is entered into a database created by Lorena Kuhns as a class project for her studies at Portland State University. The data is available on a school intranet and eventually will be posted on the Internet so it can be used by other schools and government entities studying water quality in the Fanno Creek watershed.

The data provides a baseline by which to measure effects of the recent enhancement project on the OES marsh that was funded and executed by Clean Water Services, the local sewer district. CWS graded the stream banks, raised the creek bed with various sizes of gravel, placed stumps in the stream as impediments, and replaced exotic species of plants with native species. As their science project this year, a group of five students will compare water quality indicators from before and after the CWS work.

Other students are studying particular water quality issues. Corinna A.’06 is measuring how far nitrogen dioxide travels into the wetland from Nicol Road, and Lindsley M. '06 and Elizabeth W. '06 are analyzing hydrocarbon content of a swale between the OES parking lot and the entrance to the Beginning School. Kahori S. ’06 is comparing water quality at that swale to the quality in the Nicol Road wetlands, and Khumbo B. ’05 is doing a similar project with the new swale that was created to filter runoff from the roof of the MST Building.

As juniors, most students take biology, in which they look at vegetation in the wetlands and plant succession as the wetlands undergoes a natural process of becoming drier. They study the ecology of wet, moist, and dry zones, and they also look at food webs and the flow of nutrients through wetlands.
“A wetland is one of the richest ecosystems, apart from a tropical forest,” said biology teacher Peter Langley. “It has a very high flow of nutrients through the system.”

Seniors who elect to take advanced topics in biology carry out a conservation project, map wetland areas, and study changes from previous years. By the time they leave OES, students know what a wetland is and what it does. And sometimes they develop a reverence for it.

“The students like going down there,” Peter said. “Something hits them that it’s a rather special place. They appreciate the mystery and wonder of it all. The school is incredibly lucky to have the wetlands.”