INSIDE OUT: Shaw students learn about environment

College junior Abby Close and Wharton junior John Seeg have played an instrumental role in developing the Shaw Middle School's environmental science program, the Science Alliance. The Science Alliance is one of the four Learning Communities the Shaw School uses to teach its students the reading, math and science skills that are part of a city-wide curriculum. Last summer, Shaw teachers Patricia Whack and Lori Franklin attended an environmental education seminar at George Mason University in Virginia. Daunted by the task of creating a new environmental program while teaching full-time at the Shaw School, Whack and Franklin contacted Cory Bowman at the Center For Community Partnerships to see if the University could offer any help. Bowman passed the request on to the Penn Environmental Group. Close, a PEG member, asked Seeg, a West Philadelphia Improvement Corp (WEPIC) member, to volunteer to work with her on the project. When the program started in the fall, PEG and WEPIC volunteers worked with more than 50 eighth-graders once a week on environmental issues. Six students worked in each of the two classrooms. "One teacher couldn't do what we did," Seeg said. "But with six students, we could do it. Really, we were flying by the seat of our pants the first year." Each week, Close and Seeg teamed up with Whack and Franklin to develop a new lesson plan for the classes. Each half of the tandem drew from the other's strengths -- the teachers were new to environmental issues and the volunteers lacked any teaching background. Close said she had an easy time deciding on the first lesson plan. When they asked students what environmental issues concerned them, they all spoke about the trash that surrounded their school. Responding to these concerns, volunteers taught students about waste management issues and the effects of trash on the environment. As part of their lesson, volunteers also took students outside during class time to clean up the exterior of the school. Throughout the year, the school held community clean-up days, where neighborhood residents helped remove graffiti from school property and refurbish the school's interior and exterior. The environmental program took its first steps toward becoming an academically based learning program during the spring semester. At that time, Environmental Studies Professor Bob Giegengack was teaching a class on the urban environment. Giegengack's class focused on lead contamination and other dangerous pollutants in urban areas. Giegengack said his friend Ira Harkavy, director of the Center for Community Partnerships, had been urging him for years to use his expertise to help the local community. Giegengack said he realized he had a great opportunity to do just that. His idea was track local lead levels through testing students in Shaw's environmental program. Giegengack's long-term goal was to see if educating students on how to lower lead levels in their community would have a substantial effect on those levels over a five-year period. He spoke to students at the Shaw school about lead's ill effects and suggested ways they could help reduce lead levels. After establishing scientifically sound protocols for the lead tests, Giegengack asked the Shaw students to collect dirt from their back and front yards, paint chips from their homes and even their siblings' lost teeth. As Penn students gathered the samples from the Shaw students, they taught them more about the effects of lead on health and the environment. Walt Cressler, a Geology graduate student and Giegengack's teaching assistant for the course, helped Penn students test the samples on a special x-ray fluorescent machine. Once the results were in, other students in Giegengack's class showed the Shaw students how to use a computer to graph and interpret the test results. Giegengack's class also compiled a brochure on how families can lower their lead levels. When the students completed the brochure, they distributed it to the Shaw students. The student-taught lessons about lead at the school were aimed at informing the entire Shaw community, Giegengack said. Giegengack's class also taught Shaw students about the dangers household chemicals can pose. At the end of year, they had not completed their brochure on household chemicals. But Giegengack said his class this semester will finish and distribute the brochure to the Shaw students. According to Giegengack, it would cost the city $15,000 to clean up each of the 400,000 Philadelphia homes that are contaminated with lead. The city would not be able to pay the cleanup costs, he added. "Lead abatement is not an engineering problem, it's an education problem," Giegengack said. Harkavy was more than satisfied with his colleague's work. "It really exemplifies the extraordinary contributions undergraduates can make to knowledge and the community," Harkavy said. Close, Seeg and Giegengack will continue their work at the Shaw school this year -- with a little help from Uncle Sam. The Environmental Protection Agency gave Giegengack $31,000 for his lead testing program. The money will help pay Cressler for his continued work with the class. And Wednesday, Close and Seeg accompanied Shaw Principal Al Bichner to City Hall to accept a $49,000 grant from the Department of Agriculture. The grant will be used to replace concrete outside the Shaw school and Wilson Elementary School with a grass and a community garden that the school will use for an environmental education lab. The money will also help pay for trees to be planted around the school. Shaw students will learn about the role of trees in the environment and will form a tree corp that will try to improve the neighborhood's trees. This year, as part of Shaw's learning community structure, the Science Alliance program is being expanded from roughly 50 to 200 students. Each of Shaw's fifth through eighth grades will have at least one class in the Alliance this year. "The Science Alliance really represents one of the most sophisticated and integrated of Penn's service-learning programs," Bowman said.