As GMCG is a conservation organization, most people would assume the busiest time of year is the summer. While this is true in terms of field work, our educational programs with schools consume much of our winter time. Between January and April, the most prominent educational program is GET WET! or, ground water education through water evaluation and testing. This program is uniquely valuable because it enables students to test their drinking water for six parameters in a region where 80% of homes have a private well. In New Hampshire, there’s no law requiring people to have their private well water tested regularly, only when buying or selling a house. This means that our friends and neighbors could be drinking potentially harmful water and not know it. While GET WET! doesn’t test for everything the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services does, it can spot some important indicators, reminds parents to test their water, and contributes to a database of local water quality. All of these, plus, it places the scientific experience in the hands of students.
In lieu of GMCG staff and AmeriCorps members being in the classroom, myself and Trent, the other GMCG AmeriCorps member, filmed videos on how to test for each parameter for students to watch. We set up all the stations and took turns filming each other going through the potential causes, implications, and how to test for each parameter. Two of the most exciting tests are hardness and chloride because there is a titration involved. Students add a reagent packet, then add drops of a titrant until they see a color change, either yellow to burnt orange or red to blue. The number of drops it takes to get there are used in an equation to calculate the level of hardness or mg/L of chloride in the water sample. Other tests involve a meter, for pH and conductivity, or a test strip, for iron and nitrates/nitrites. Trent and I also filmed videos with our groundwater model. Another activity that is usually done with students, we instead combined explanation videos with time lapses to show students how water, and contaminants, move through the earth and up wells. Despite COVID-19 complications, we still managed to put numbers and visuals to student’s drinking water, something that few of us think about beyond the tap and the drain.
The pre-visit and post-visit were also online and we tried to find engaging ways to provide the educational content. In the pre-vist, we ask the students what they use water for, and have them guess how much water it takes to make a burger, fries, and a soda (1,400 gallons). In the post-visit they practice calculating mean, median, mode, and range to help them understand how to interpret the data. We also mark all the sample sites on Google Earth and have the students look at local land uses. It’s really important to make the connections between land use and groundwater quality because most people aren’t thinking about the water before it leaves the tap. Students noticed gravel pits, road salt storage, agricultural fields, heavily paved areas, and major roads, all of which pose a potential risk to water quality. Students came away from the program with a richer understanding of not only their personal well water quality, but why certain results may have occurred and how to test further and mitigate issues. Despite COVID-19, we were able to creatively provide this program to about 150 students in our watershed and I hope GMCG will be back in the classroom again next year.
EB has been looking forward to interacting with more folks in GMCG’s community, which is becoming possible with the (mostly) warmer weather! Learn more about EB here.