Students Wade into Water Quality
This month, students from Thornwood High School explored the river on a field trip to Sweet Woods and Wampum Lake in Chicago’s south suburbs. Thornwood High School, located in South Holland, is one of the two newest schools to join Friends’ Adopt A River Schools program, which is part of our Chicago River Schools Network (CRSN).
Thirty-one students from freshmen Honors Biology and senior IB Chemistry and Environmental Systems & Societies classes took their inaugural trip to their school’s adopted site on October 1. Students participated in a nature scavenger hunt, waded into North Creek, a tributary of the Little Calumet River to collect macroinvertebrates, and performed water chemistry tests using materials funded by Friends’ recent EPA-funded grant.
“This trip made me want to go outside more and appreciate nature,” said Jeremy Price, a Thornwood senior. Thornwood teachers hope that the IB seniors will have a similar impact when they lead their peers in student-led fieldwork and a cleanup day planned later this spring.
The CRSN, Friends’ dynamic teacher training and hands-on learning program for students, empowers teachers within the Chicago-Calumet River watershed with knowledge and resources to teach about local ecology through workshops, presentations, and field trips, and fosters the next generation of environmental leaders to take action towards a healthy, climate-resilient river system for all.
In the Adopt A River Schools program, schools commit to have students monitor the river’s water quality and habitat by gathering chemical and biological scientific data from the river and participate in restoration and cleanup activities. Each school is required to have an active team of two or more teachers.
The other Adopt A River School to join the program this year is Back of the Yards College Prep High School, a Chicago Public School in the New City community on the city’s southwest side.
Back of the Yards has been a major part of our programs since 2020, having consistently taken students out on field trips and participating in the Chicago River Student Congress. They have adopted Saganashkee Slough, part of the Crooked Creek watershed in the Palos region which flows into the Cal-Sag Channel.
Since its founding in 1996, the CRSN has engaged more than half a million students and teachers in science, language arts, and history activities at schools and river locations, north, south, and west. Designed to provide teachers with the tools they need to meet Next Generation Science Standards, the CRSN provides K-12 teachers with the training and personalized assistance they need to teach students ways to investigate real world issues and create service-learning projects that work to solve everyday problems facing the river and our communities.
