Clean Creek Campus is a partnership between the City of Austin, Watershed Protection Department and Keep Austin Beautiful. The program fosters environmental stewardship by providing hands-on activities about watersheds and our environment that lead to a service-learning project.

 

 

Fall 2011 Results!

• 12 Schools with 40 Classes Participated
• 119 Presentations Led
• 910 Students Educated
• 15 Service Projects Completed including creek and campus cleanups, compost installations, and creek restoration projects!

Participating Schools: Austin Jewish Academy, Blazier ES, Brentwood ES, Small MS, Hill ES, Hillcrest ES, Menchaca ES, Southwest Key, Texas Empowerment Academy, UT ES, Webb MS, and Williams ES.

To complement their ever expanding gardens behind the school, Texas Empowerment Academy reused old shipping pallets to construct a 3-bin compost system for their CCC fall project.  Seventh grade students became soil scientists for the day testing nutrient levels in different samples including an old garden bed behind their school. They knew in order to have the best gardens they needed to produce rich healthy soil, and what a better way than to recycle food scraps at the same time! In addition to the outdoor bin, they built a vermi-compost bin to house their new classroom pets – 1,000 red wiggler worms. With lunch scheduled right between the classes, students practiced sorting fruit and veggie scraps to feed their hungry worms. The project diverted 3 bins full of yard waste the school had been collecting during their garden renovation that will now be recycled back into the ground for an organic vegetable garden CCC will help them build in the spring!

 

 Williams Elementary School

“Miss, can I join you every day (to pull invasives and clean the creek)?” If you are like us at KAB reading that makes you smile and know that the learning taking place through Clean Creek Campus at schools and at service projects really does make an impression on youth. The response from a 4th grader at Williamson Elementary School came after spending a morning at Onion Creek exploring the area guided by Watershed Protection staff and using a scavenger hunt, finding trash buried in muddy areas of the creek shoreline and bulk materials hidden in brushy areas in the nearby park, collecting and identifying aquatic bugs to determine the health of the waterway, and removing invasive water hyacinth that has formed a blanket over the creek inlet. The service project was all the more meaningful since students had studied the decomposition rates of trash and how trash runs off the land to our creeks in previous sessions.