Students speak at watershed summit

Some 200 young, eager and exceptionally talented students from the IEE (Integrated Environmental Education) program in Sisters, Black Butte School, REALMS school in Bend, and Cascades Academy attended the seventh annual Watershed Summit put on by Kolleen Yake, education director for the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council (UDWC), on Tuesday, May 13.

Yake started the Watershed Summit and Students Speak program seven years ago.

"We created the Watershed Summit as a way to give the students we work with an inspiring forum to share their watershed projects," she said. "Our students create incredible artwork, poetry, and songs about our rivers and streams and, at the Watershed Summit, students are invited to tell their stream stories with one empowered voice."

Sisters High School junior Nila Lukens said, "IEE integrates different aspects of appreciation of life, our teachers, the scientific elements of Whychus Creek and the opportunity to share with others."

Lukens and her IEE partner, Shea Krevi, are making a scrapbook of the different groups to keep the memories of Student Speak alive in the years to come.

Sister junior Dani Rudinsky also took part in restoring a great deal of riparian habitat with 20 to 30 other IEE students along Whychus Creek last spring, planting willows and sedges.

Sam Pierce, teacher at Black Butte School, took several of his students to the Watershed Summit, and experienced exactly what Yake has been working toward all these years:

"Students Speak was a powerful setting for student conversations - a wonderful nexus of student creativity and collaboration, artistic expression and scientific inquiry. I think all the teachers involved would agree the experience went a long way toward developing an attitude of stewardship in students toward our local waterways. In a climate of standardized teaching, experiences like this equip students as stakeholders for the real-world problems that exist outside the classroom."

Fifth-grader Skylar Wilkins said, "I thought that it was a fun, unique experience and I hope I can do it again next year. The videos were high-quality and the other students definitely knew what they were doing. I felt small, seeing as I was one of the youngest students there, and one of the least experienced."

Tasman Rheuben, seventh grade student, noted, "I had a lot of fun learning about other school projects that have to do with wildlife restoration, from studying feeding patterns of hummingbirds to writing songs about local streams. I completely enjoyed it."

As the Watershed Summit wound down toward the middle of the day, the beauty, sounds, life of Whychus Creek, the Metolius, Deschutes and the habitat that makes up these unique watersheds became part of so many students' lives.

In the closing ceremonies, junior Angela Todd sang the song she wrote:

Whychus

Leaves on the ground, where the water flows free

In this place I have found where I can be me

Life someday will come to end

What will we choose, right around this river bend

Flows the Whychus

And the river rushes on

And the river rushes on...