CA Science Students Are Bear Creek Stewards

Lower Bear Creek, an eight-mile stretch of water that flows near the Colorado Academy campus through Lakewood, Denver, and Sheridan, begins with a crystal-clear trickle atop Mount Evans, gaining volume as it descends through undisturbed forests before reaching the suburbs west of Denver. There, the water quality of Bear Creek changes dramatically. 

Varied nearby land uses are largely to blame for the steep decline, including impacts from residential areas, recreation, and business developments, and in 2010, the Lower Bear Creek, between Kipling Parkway and the confluence with the South Platte River, was listed as impaired by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) because of elevated levels of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli). Its presence indicates fecal contamination, which can pose public health risks if polluted water is ingested or enters the body through open cuts or wounds.

There’s good news, however: Upper School students in CA’s Environmental Chemistry course have been keeping a close eye on this stretch of Bear Creek for the past four years, as part of the statewide River Watch program, an initiative that monitors water quality and other indicators of watershed health so that the data can be used to educate communities and inform state and local decision-makers. 

Managed by the nonprofit River Science, in partnership with Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), River Watch is the lone organization monitoring the health of Colorado’s 770,000 miles of rivers, reliant on thousands of volunteer stewards—encompassing public and private schools, individuals, municipalities, and state and nonprofit organizations—to collect data year round from the hundreds of stations installed across the entire Colorado watershed.

According to Upper School Science Instructor Sydney Finkbohner, who established the partnership between CA and River Watch in developing the syllabus for Environmental Chemistry, “There’s no better way for our science students to apply the concepts they learn in the classroom than investigating what’s going on in their own backyard.”

All CA Upper School students take Biology and Chemistry for their Ninth and Tenth Grade course requirements. Starting in their Junior year, the list of Science Department electives available to them expands vastly, featuring everything from AP Chemistry and AP Physics I to advanced courses in genetics, astronomy, physiology, and much more. Environmental Chemistry is part of that expanded list, offering a plethora of hands-on labs and projects as an alternative—or in addition to—more traditional, textbook-based science courses.

“Many of our students double up on Science in their Junior or Senior years,” explains Finkbohner. “They may want to continue with that rigorous AP science track, but they are also really interested in the environment, climate change, and other areas that affect them. Environmental Chemistry and our Bear Creek stewardship offer a way to do both.”

Each month, the students in Finkbohner’s class travel a few minutes north of campus, to the spot where South Pierce Street dead-ends at the Bear Creek Trail, and take water samples in the field, analyzing the Lower Bear Creek station’s data for temperature, dissolved oxygen, alkalinity, and hardness, as well as collecting samples that are screened for metals, nutrients, macroinvertebrates, and insects. All the information is uploaded to a publicly-accessible  database, and a copy is kept in Finkbohner’s classroom as well, allowing her students to track water health from one season and one year to the next.

“This is very real, very valuable data,” she notes. “It’s used to make state legislation, determine local environmental priorities, and even influence policies for protected areas such as Rocky Mountain National Park.”

It is also, Finkbohner continues, a very tangible way for students to participate in “real” science, where the data they collect is for a real purpose. (In this way, the course resembles CA’s signature science offering, Tiny Earth, which allows students to join in the hunt for new antibiotics to combat the crisis of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.) 

Several Environmental Chemistry students have gone on to study the environmental sciences as undergraduates, she observes, underscoring the main goals established by River Science for the River Watch project: “To encourage, inspire, and equip the next generation of leaders, engineers, and technicians to help solve, protect, and manage our water.”

In addition to focusing on water—a major area of concern in Colorado and throughout the West—the students in Environmental Chemistry look at air and soil quality and how they, too, are affected by human and other factors. They investigate prevailing systems of waste management and energy generation, and they conclude the course with a case study focused on the mining industry. In the two-day research project, they analyze environmental impact mitigation efforts previously implemented at Western sites, and they predict future impacts from the Thacker Pass lithium mine, located in northern Nevada, which is set to begin producing battery-grade lithium carbonate by 2026.

“CA students are concerned about their world and motivated to do something,” observes Finkbohner. “At the same time, they often don’t understand the ‘why?’—the ground-level science underlying those concerns.” Environmental Chemistry and the River Watch partnership provide the answers they need to take action.