GO WITH THE FLOW

WASILLA — When you break out the spring fishing gear and enjoy the first sunny weekends of spring on a pristine Little Su or Cottonwood Creek, chances are you can thank some local young people for the experience.

Since 2005, more than 1,000 Teeland Middle School seventh-graders — dubbed the Seventh-Grade River Rangers — have used the school’s unique program to learn about ecology and the environment and perform critical community service to local habitats.

“While other students are back in school doing worksheets or sitting inside a stuffy building, you are out there in the field,” said Georg Taylor, a retired TMS teacher and one of the founders of the Seventh-Grade River Rangers Program.

Taylor was back at Teeland Friday to help present a special award to the school and current science teachers Mike Shea and Rhett Buchanan.

Alaska Forum on the Environment recently honored the teachers with an Outstanding Achievement Award. Catherine Inman, manager for the Wasilla Soil and Water Conservation District sent in a stealth nomination for the award, and surprised Shea and Buchanan with it on Friday.

“It’s nice to get that recognition, and teachers don’t always get that,” said Shea, adding he thought he and Buchanan were called to an assembly to hear a presentation from the school nurse. “And this goes to Teeland. We couldn’t do this without (the rest of the school’s) support.”

By honoring the River Rangers program, Teeland’s efforts are making an impact, Buchanan said.

“This says we’ve been doing it long enough that people are starting to take notice,” he said. “We want to keep it going for a long time.”

Along with course work on ecology and the environment, seventh-graders spend weeks out in the field performing cleanup and research local nonprofits like the Wasilla Soil and Water Conservation District find useful.

“It’s also really fun,” said Christina Hoy, a TMS eighth-grader who participated in River Rangers last school year. “I think it’s really cool, because I had just moved up from Pennsylvania last year and before that I had really never had a chance to go out and learn about the surroundings. I learned about the way the river works and that made me want to conserve the river more.”

Classmate Mady Shotenski also enjoyed the program last year, and said he also learned that people throw just about anything into a river or creek.

“When we were cleaning out the river, we found railroad ties, we found a lot of stuff —like fishing poles, bicycles, we found a lot of stuff people threw in the river,” he said. “I don’t understand why people would just throw that stuff in there.”

Because students get to work on-site like professional scientists do, they retain more information, Shotenski said.

“It was much more fun than just sitting in a classroom,” he said. “We got to actually do it and be more hands-on than just watching. We were able to get in and do everything for ourselves.”

Which is the point, Shea and Buchanan said.

“It’s placed-based education,” Shea said. “We take students out to real-world sites and rivers. There are multiple places on the Little Su that we’ve cleaned up and done restoration and put up signs. We also have a lot of data we’ve collected over the years, like on the bugs in the streams, the microinvertebrates.”

That River Rangers have been making a difference for so long is a testament to the dedication of teachers like Shea and Buchanan, Taylor said.

“To get you out there to have those experiences means your teachers have worked well beyond their work day — evenings, early mornings, weekends — writing grants and doing a lot of really hard work many teachers don’t want to do because they’re already working hard,” he said. “There are some people who teach as a job and some who teach as a passion. You are fortunate your teachers teach passionately and love what they do.”

As long as there’s a need for the ecological work and students are excited about learning, Shea and Buchanan said they’ll continue to lead Teeland’s River Rangers.

“We wouldn’t keep doing it if the kids weren’t excited about it,” Shea said. “As far as I’m concerned, the smiles on their faces at the end of the year is worth every ounce of work.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.