photo by: Contributed

Many students participate in the Kids About Water program, collecting macroinvertebrates to help determine the water quality of a body of water.

With help from some new state funding, Friends of the Kaw wants to get more kids thinking about water — and about the slopes, surfaces and even tiny invertebrates that can tell us more about it.

The nonprofit focused on protecting the Kansas River has received $48,331 from the Kansas Water Office to expand the online presence of its Kids About Water program for middle and high school students, which has been around for 10 years but only went online when COVID hit.

So far, the Kids About Water program has engaged more than 10,000 students in grades six through 12, offering hands-on field experiences focused on water quality, watersheds, stormwater runoff and how these elements are connected.

“We believe that when students understand more about what’s happening in their water, it’ll help them make decisions as adults and with their own families that can be beneficial to water quality in the future,” Executive Director of Friends of the Kaw Dawn Buehler said.

photo by: Contributed

Friends of the Kaw offers a program, Kids About Water, for middle school and high school students to learn about water quality.

Because so many factors play a role in water quality, the program teaches kids about a diverse mix of concepts.

Some of them have to do with runoff and how it flows. Students are asked to explore the concept of a watershed by observing the slope of their school grounds and studying how water drains on and off of the area. They learn about the differences between pervious and impervious surfaces — pervious surfaces allow water to soak in, while impervious surfaces prevent it.

They also learn how to calculate the estimated amount of runoff that could accumulate on their school campus after an inch of rainfall. And they use kits to perform both chemical and nonchemical water quality tests at a nearby water site, such as a river, lake, creek, stream or pond.

Some of the topics might come as a surprise, such as learning about little insects called “macroinvertebrates” and their role and value in the environment.

“Macroinvertebrates are the little, tiny bugs that you find in the water, so a lot of times they’re underneath rocks,” Buehler said. ” … They can be all different kinds of water-loving bugs that are good indicators of good water quality, or the absence of them is an indication of bad water quality.”

photo by: Contributed

Students participating in the Kids About Water program with Friends of the Kaw collect several macroinvertebrates to determine water quality of a body of water.

After doing water quality tests and assessing the overall condition of their water site, the teachers and students choose an environmental project aimed at improving the water quality there, and then carry that project out during the school year.

“That might be something like putting in some sort of native grass buffer strip between your school parking lot and the creek,” Buehler said. “It might be hosting a trash cleanup on your school grounds. It could be coming up with any sort of nature-based solution to improve the water quality in that stream.”

Over the past decade, many nearby school districts have taken advantage of the program, Buehler told the Journal-World. But the program is not as accessible to students living in small towns or rural areas, and several years ago, there was talk about ways to expand it statewide. To do that, Friends of the Kaw created an online version of the program at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We did it really fast because, as you well know, COVID shut us down in March, and we had to teach students in April,” Buehler said.

Buehler and the team were never fully satisfied with this version of the program, and they wanted to make it even more available and applicable to people around the state.

“It worked for the moment, but we wanted to create a program that eventually teachers across the entire watershed could use, but we also needed (to make) some changes to it,” Buehler said.

Now, with the state funding — part of the water office’s Kansas Water Plan Partnership Initiative — the Friends of the Kaw team can develop new technology-based activities for kids around the state to do, including using the geographic information system platform ArcGIS for data collection and to encourage collaboration between schools around the state.

The team will also be able to implement a new groundwater module, in partnership with the Kansas Geological Survey, to expand their audience to the western part of Kansas, whose residents don’t get their drinking water the same way as residents of eastern Kansas.

“This program on the eastern side of the state is really geared towards surface water, which is streams, creeks, lakes and those types of water bodies,” Buehler said. “But the Kansas River watershed is (about) 61,000 square miles. It covers almost the entire upper half of Kansas, eastern Colorado and central Nebraska, and so if you think about the western side of Kansas, they don’t rely on surface water for their drinking water. They rely on groundwater, which is the Ogallala Aquifer in most cases.”

In addition to the Kansas Geological Survey, the Kansas Rural Water Association and K-State Research & Extension will collaborate with the Friends of the Kaw on the updated online program.

Eventually, Buehler said the team hopes that the program will expand to as many schools as possible, and that teachers around the state will see it as a good addition to their science curriculum.

The Kansas Water Plan Partnership Initiative is in its second year and is distributing $320,000 to a total of seven projects around the state. The initiative supports projects focused on conserving the High Plains Aquifer, improving water quality, reducing vulnerability to extreme events and raising awareness of Kansas water resources.