MARS HILL - What started off as a trip to a local park has now turned into something far more substantial.
More than 40 Madison High students participated in a trip to Beech Glen Community Center March 15 in a project to restore the community center's park streams that were impacted by erosion.
According to MHS science teachers Leslie Schoof, Oshen Wallin and Keith Wyatt, the students are drafting five design layouts for the county-owned park to be presented to local officials in May.
Wyatt said the project kicked off last April after meeting Beech Glen resident Paul Smith during a trip to the park with his wife and kids.
"I saw (Smith) walking through the creek, and I said, 'Oh, he's doing science. Let me go talk to him,'" Wyatt said. "I had just come a day or two earlier and (the MHS science teachers) and we were talking about project-based learning in one of our meetings, and I thought, 'Well this is perfect. It checks all the boxes.'"
Schoof said project-based learning has become more common nationally, as teachers are increasingly seeking ways to engage their students as they return to the classroom full time.
"Traditionally, school is lecture-based. It's teacher-directed," she said. "There's a lot of stuff in schoolwork that feels like busy work to the kids, and they don't really understand how it relates to their real lives. So, our goal with community-based learning projects is to show them that the things they're learning in school have a real-world application.
"When we went down (March 15) to work at Beech Glen, all the things that we were talking about in earth science - like global warming and climate change from cutting down trees, invasive species, and sediment erosion - that was an opportunity to say, 'All that stuff we talked about. Here it is in the real world.' Once the kids understand that it's a real issue, they naturally want to fix it."
Madison High student Taylor Marler said it was heartwarming to know the students were making a difference.
"Our work at Beech Glen is going to make an impact on the community, and of course on Beech Glen itself," Marler said. "It's nice to know that."
The March 15 trip is the second trip this school year, as the students visited Beech Glen in the fall as well.
"The group was taking stock of the biodiversity - using our phones to tag and learn animals and plants," Wyatt said. "They worked on the stream corridor analysis, so the students walked the length of the stream and used a rubric to assess the health of the stream.
"My group of kids was taking water quality measurements, temperature and chemical analysis," Wyatt said. "Others were eyeballing the property to get some ideas and see what they thought."
The March 15 trip was a totally different scenario, according to Schoof.
"The morning was divided up as a work day," she said. "We had (Ivy River Partners) members talking about stream restoration. So, we walked the whole length of the stream and they showed us all the things they did to restore the creek bed. Then, we had a contractor, Shawn Moore, and he showed the kids how to plant live stake (trees)."
The kids planted 100 live stakes - young sapling trees that help stabilize the streambank - including the park's namesake, beech trees.
"The kids just went crazy with it," Wallin said. "They were able to plant them all in a record time. They had such a good time planting them."
Background
Smith is affiliated with the Mars Hill nonprofit Greater Ivy Community Citizen Association, who partnered with the high school to assist with the project.
"A big part of what we want to do is create partnerships with community groups to allow students to get real-world, hands-on experience," Schoof said.
According to Wallin, Mountain Valleys Resource & Conservation Development's Ivy River Partners, a Marshall-based nonprofit that aims to conserve land and water along the Ivy Water Rivershed, also partnered with the school system for the project.
The restoration project was also backed by the RootEd program, a partnership with federally funded college access program Appalachian GEAR UP striving to connect students and educators in western North Carolina with community partners to address and solve authentic, local challenges, according to the program's website.
"RootEd shows teachers how to merge the concepts of community-based learning with the incorporation of the curriculum," Wallin said. "It's really just a marriage of both worlds."
According to Schoof, the RootEd program has been instrumental in allowing Madison to bolster its academic programming.
"In that timeframe, we've managed to bring in (Wyatt), we have Rachael Ray who teaches Spanish as part of RootEd," Schoof said. "Also, (2021 District Teacher of the Year) Meagan Morgan, who teaches English, has joined in. Kirsten Davis in the art department has joined in. Our goal, we hope, is to develop some sort of community partnership learning opportunity for every kid in this building. It's a pretty audacious goal, but that's what we're going for."
According to Wallin, that career and technical education background overlap helped the students in their design layouts.
"They've been in drafting, so they know how to do things to scale and what a blueprint looks like," she said. "They know what these layouts are supposed to represent, and how to make them. The construction guys, they knew what the layouts represented, and they were able to transition their thoughts into (drafting) these layouts. So that was really cool, because they were able to use the other classes and put it on paper and adapt it."
According to the teachers, the students drafted five design layouts for their goals for the community center. In the coming weeks, the students will present to local government officials in a ceremony on May 3.
"The kids are going to pitch their plans," Schoof said. "So, our hope is that either one of these plans in its entirety to go forward, or the people there will decide that they want elements from all the different plans. Each class is competing against the other four classes. (Some) layouts have a dog park, others don't, for example."
Though Smith's professional background is in the social sciences - he has a Ph.D in human and organizational systems - he has always been fascinated by the physical sciences, he said.
"If there's anything I want to do for the rest of my life, it's learn," Smith said. "Applying what I've learned here is a lot of fun."
Smith said his neighbor Clifton Metcalf began the restoration process to take away the feed banks and create a floodplain at the park, so the water could spread out more effectively.
"When the water comes down at a high volume, rather than surging through a tight channel where the water just shoots out, it does more of a sprayed kind of function and spreads out over the floodplain and loses speed. It has more chance to soak into the ground," Smith said.
Shortly after Wyatt met Smith, Metcalf assembled a group composed of engineers, MHS representatives and local funding agencies to help devise a game plan for the restoration.
"It's going to be an opportunity in the near future for recreation, education and playing - just kids having a ball and playing in the creeks, and learning about plants and aquatic life," Smith said.
"We'll eventually have a butterfly garden and pollination gardens, and those kinds of things. It's going to be, I hope, a showcase. We've got a good thing started."
In Schoof's view, the students feel as if their contributions may have a lasting impact in their community.
"It's a fantastic learning opportunity for them to take academic knowledge and apply it in a real-world fashion that's actually going to benefit them and their children and their community," Schoof said. "The'yre getting it. They understand, and they appreciate that they're being given the opportunity to do something real."
*Original Article Published Here
Madison High science teachers
