Cutchogue elementary students win $5G grant in new Water Quality Challenge competition

Elementary school students in Southold Town have won a $5,000 grant for a project designed to reduce runoff and nitrogen pollution on school grounds that contaminates local waters.

Cutchogue East Elementary School was one of two in Suffolk County to get a grant from The Long Island Regional Planning Council as part of its first Long Island Water Quality Challenge. The challenge is a STEM competition encouraging students to reduce runoff and nitrogen pollution on school grounds and incorporate those projects into ongoing educational programs.

Meghan Tepfenhardt, the Cutchogue school’s STEAM coordinator (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics), told Newsday last week that students began their research about a year ago. The students used readers’ and writers’ workshops to research nitrogen pollution and its effects on Peconic waterways in years past before working on design options.

Tepfenhardt said she hoped the project helped participating students learn more about and appreciate their local waterways.

"The best learning is authentic learning," Tepfenhardt said. "They sail these waters, they swim in these waters, they fish there, there’s family members who work in marinas and as fishermen. Developing a greater understanding of the local ecosystems and the affect we have on them, positive and negative, is very important."

In the end, seventh-graders Matthew Haas, Melody Hammerle, Allison Grattan and Jake Talbot, who worked on the winning project while in sixth grade last year, created a design and plan for implementing a bioretention garden on the school’s campus. The project will use soil, plants and microbes to treat stormwater before it is infiltrated or discharged.

Haas, 13, of Southold, said he had fun working on the project and came away with a greater appreciation of why it’s important to protect local waters.

"It was interesting learning how plants work in a natural environment and how nitrogen harms waters," Haas said. "With global warming, it’s important to learn how to help the waters and reduce pollution before it turns to chaos."

As solutions are sought to cut nitrogen pollution in Long Island waters, environmental groups said educating children on how to take care of the Island’s waterways is a big step in assuring the future of the local ecosystem.

Joyce Novack, program director at the Peconic Estuary Partnership, said there had been "great strides" in reducing nitrogen in Peconic and East End waterways, such as Suffolk County working with communities to upgrade septic systems. However, the presence of algal blooms in local waters indicates there is still work ahead, Novack added.

"We still have a lot of work to do, and it’s important to continue to raise awareness and education" she said. "Educating school-age children is extremely important because not only does it teach them the problem and steps to reduce it, but they bring that message home and it resounds in the communities they live in."

Richard Guardino, executive director of The Long Island Regional Planning Council, had similar thoughts.

"Water is the lifeblood of Long Island. It’s in everything we do" he said. "There’s starting to be a real understanding that we have to focus on this and do whatever we can to protect our water resources."