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Education
Rippling Out: The Impact of of LSRA’s Environmental Education Program
It’s 9:00 a.m. on a sunny spring day in May. Devin Winand, Deputy Director of Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association (LSRA), Megan McCarthy, LSRA’s Community Engagement Coordinator, and Aaron Dixon, Program Coordinator for LSRA, gather at Long Level to greet a group of middle-schoolers. The kids scramble off the bus, excited to head down to the bank of Lake Clarke, so named because of its slow-moving water, where a fleet of tandem kayaks awaits them. Many of the students have never been on the river or seen it in person. Some are nervous, while others, who have fished or swum in the river before, are excited to show off their expertise.
The kids are split into two groups: the first group heads to the kayaks and life jackets with Winand, while the second group goes to Fishing Creek for an on-the-water stream study that also allows them to develop their kayaking skills.
Winand is on the river almost every time there’s a paddle. He starts the kayakers off with the safety goals for the day:
Safety first. Pay attention to your surroundings. Don’t stand up in the kayak. Keep your life vest on and zipped up at all times. The life jackets have whistles attached. Don’t blow them for no reason. A blown whistle is a sign of distress, but too many fake emergencies mean you may not get the help you need when you need it. Listen to instructions carefully; conditions on the river can change, and we may need to head back to shore.
Always have footwear. River rocks can be sharp rocks. Similarly, fishing hooks, metal, screws, and other debris continually end up in the Susquehanna, and some items can cause real damage. Keep horseplay to a minimum. While splashing around is fun, we don’t want anyone falling off their boat; it’s harder to get back into a floating kayak than it looks.
No throwing rocks. The river is a living, breathing ecosystem, and rocks can disturb the invertebrates, macroinvertebrates, fish, and other living beings within it. Follow your guides who will be at the front (leader) and back (sweeper) of the group. If you stay between those guides, no one gets lost or left behind.
Finally, the kids are taught how to get into and out of a kayak safely. Once Winand is satisfied that the kids have absorbed these safety lessons, they board their boats and set off.
The bigger safety issues, such as river conditions, wind, high water, rain, thunderstorms, debris, and bacteria levels, to name a few, are determined before the kids arrive. A muddy, high, and fast-moving river with tree debris floating downstream after a storm is not a safe place to teach. These details are relayed to the teachers before the children’s arrival, and a decision is made before departure to ensure everyone experiences an optimal day on the river.
The kids, along with their chaperones and teachers, paddle for an hour or so, perhaps their first time in a kayak. Sometimes, there will be a child who doesn’t want to go, but usually, the staff or a volunteer can talk them into it by easing their fears and focusing on the wonders they will discover while kayaking. At a mile across, the Mighty Susquehanna can be an imposing river. LSRA staff and volunteers appreciate this fact and do their best to ensure everyone feels comfortable. Most of the time, even those who were initially uncomfortable want to come back.
Meanwhile, McCarthy talks to the second group about the purpose of this river tour to ensure a meaningful, watershed-centric, educational experience. Before McCarthy came to LSRA, she was an environmental and science educator with a focus on Pennsylvania ecology, stream ecology, and overall forest health, as well as native habitats. Getting students outside and having a positive experience both on and off the water is one of her goals. She has worked for non-profits over the years, focusing on environmental education, and is excited to work on water ecology and watershed management.
Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience, or MWEEs, are a way to teach STEELS, Pennsylvania’s new science standards — science, technology, engineering, environmental literacy, and sustainability standards. LSRA has developed a model to describe how watersheds and wetlands function as interconnected systems, by analyzing and interpreting how issues, trends, technologies, and policies impact watersheds. LSRA’s model meets these standards through outdoor field experiences by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting environmental data. When assessed together, LSRA is able to interpret the health of the local watershed. Additionally, LSRA hopes this work will spark the next group of youth river watchdogs.
The MWEEs meet the new state standards in science, to which teachers must adhere. By teaching to MWEE standards, LSRA also serves its mission of advocacy and awareness for the Susquehanna and the surrounding watershed. McCarthy focuses the students on local issues, including data collection, investigation, and problem-solving.
The grade levels are primarily 6th-12th, but LSRA occasionally works with college students. The new state standards are what environmental educators have been doing for many years: hands-on, issue-focused, place-based education that helps schools meet the latest standards. By working alongside teachers and providing them with the tools to do so, it fills a gap in the curriculum for local issues with a hands-on, outdoors approach, which is a significant change for many teachers who would not otherwise have had access to the river. Volunteers, often Master Watershed Stewards, assist with the stream studies when additional help is needed. This year and historically, programming took place in the spring and fall, but changes will be coming soon with the new programming extending education to the entire school year.
The current program has a storied history. Winand’s parents started Shank’s Mare 45 years ago. The store was a retail outlet catering to backpackers, campers, windsurfers, and hikers. The last 20 years of its 45-year history were focused on paddle sports. Part of Shank’s Mare’s mission was to train people to navigate the outdoors safely, by giving them the skills to do so, along with a sense of place, introducing customers to locations where they could practice their chosen sport and schooling them in the history behind it. Early on, Winand’s father led trips to Mt. Rainier, the Sierras, Cape Hatteras, and Eagles Mere, among others. Their love of the outdoors made this not just a retail outlet, but a means to introduce people to the natural world.
In the 1990s, the owners decided to start a kids’ day camp. Some of the first kids’ camps were for friends of Winand’s or friends of Shank’s Mare. The camp ran until the COVID pandemic in 2020. They conducted four week-long sessions every summer for kids, ages 10-12 and 13-15. Windsurfing, caving, hiking, stream studies, and trash removal from local stream corridors were part of the camp experience, which is very similar to the mission of LSRA, which relies on outdoor recreation to emphasize environmental conservation.
Shank’s Mare relocated to Long Level in 1997, and the owners hired Gretchen Young, who held a master’s degree in wildlife and fisheries. She helped develop an educational program with a focus on water quality and macroinvertebrate studies. Over those 23 years, approximately 30,000 children participated in their programs. In 2024, LSRA acquired the Shank’s Mare program. Some of the same schools are still participating, so Winand has been working with the same group of teachers for a considerable amount of time.
Under LSRA’s tutelage, the goal is less about a pure outdoor experience and more about science education, focusing on advocacy using the MWEE framework, facilitating outdoor field experiences, and collaborating with educators to identify issues, conducting investigations and fieldwork, and finding solutions led by students’ questions and inquiries about the river watershed as seen through the lens of the collected data. To achieve this, experiences in paddling and boating are essential as they bridge the outdoor recreation and connection to place with meaningful watershed educational experiences (MWEEs).
The kids will focus on various aspects of pollution, including plastic pollution, chemicals, dissolved oxygen, bacteria, and turbidity, among other topics, to gain an understanding of the science behind river ecology. They assess the health of the area, which encompasses the river, the local watershed, and the riverbanks. In the future, the program will also analyze the students’ schoolyards, determining how they are connected to and can impact the Susquehanna River, the largest tributary to the Chesapeake Bay, which provides approximately half of the freshwater that feeds the Bay. LSRA hopes to launch this refined school programming in the coming school year.
In addition to the schoolyard analysis, the planned protocol includes multiple field trips, lesson plans, and assessments of bioindicators and streams. Many of the schools are listed as Title I, meaning they are underserved. McCarthy and Winand both participate in writing grants to help cover the cost of this programming.
One of the programs LSRA would like to expand is already in place at the Red Lion Middle School, which has a stream ecology class. The Red Lion students conducted stream studies in their local stream to gather specific data. LSRA also took them on a trash cleanup because it supplemented their focus area, which was to assess the amount and type of trash around the river and at the school. By the end of this field trip, the kids were exhausted, so there was no test, but there was a post-data debriefing to connect the dots and determine the stream’s health. Back at school, the kids piled their collections into their classroom at Red Lion, where they then estimated the amount and types of waste collected. LSRA was invited to attend the Red Lion event to observe the students presenting their work. LSRA hopes to conduct more trash assessments and cleanup/inventories with additional school groups.
LSRA conducts stream studies with almost every group. Fishing Creek, located at the south end of Long Level, is a great place to sample for macroinvertebrates. They use kick nets, big nets that capture sediment from the river bottom, to find their treasures. By moving a few rocks and grabbing a netful of sediment, the kids can pull macroinvertebrates into the net for analysis. They pull the net out and examine what they found, or turn rocks over to see what’s living underneath. The kids observe them on-site while McCarthy explains what they’ve found. When the lesson is over, they put everything back in the river.
This past spring, between May 2 and May 29, 2025, LSRA hosted 637 kids on the river in groups of approximately 15 to 30 per group. Last year, LSRA hosted over 1400 students, but weather (thunderstorms) forced them to cancel several of the sessions this past spring. During this busy season, they might see anywhere from 30 to 80 kids in a day! The ultimate goal is to conduct more programming sessions with fewer students at a time, allowing them to have a more hands-on experience.
LSRA attracts a diverse group of students in terms of their experience levels. Twenty years ago, not many people knew about kayaking, but today it is much more prevalent, so LSRA is drawing in more students who are comfortable on the water. Still, there are plenty of students who might never get the chance to kayak if it weren’t for this program. They use tandem kayaks so everyone has a partner. Often, the most nervous kids want to come back and do it again. It’s hard to tell if the teenagers had fun, since they don’t often express or verbalize their feelings. Usually, a few students will shake Winand’s hand and thank him for the experience. Occasionally, while Shank’s Mare was still running, adults would come into the office to say they had gone on a field trip years ago, and it was one of the best experiences they had ever had. Those types of experiences are what shape a young outdoor enthusiast.
With the transition from Shank’s Mare to the non-profit world, LSRA has seized this opportunity not to reinvent the wheel. With the bones of the program already in place, along with equipment, contacts, and relationships with schools and other organizations like the National Aquarium. Rather than spending time building from the ground up, LSRA has the unique advantage of focusing strictly on improving the curriculum to make it compatible with state standards.
McCarthy, along with Board member Sarah Jennings, gave Winand a crash course in the educational aspect of this program, as his schooling was in business and marketing, with a degree in management. Winand is now well-versed in state standards, such as MWEEs, and McCarthy and Jennings soon hope to learn from Winand and get out on the water more for more of the ground-truthing experience.
Jennings, Chair of LSRA’s Education Committee, was a formal classroom teacher in the environmental science realm and now works for Earth Force, a small national organization that aims to create young stewards through curriculum and outdoor experiences. Sarah also coaches and trains educators, school districts, and informal environmental educators on Environmental Action Civics across the Chesapeake Bay Watershed region. To bring LSRA’s program up to state standards, Jennings leaned into her 15 years of teacher training in formal and non-formal spaces across the Chesapeake Bay area. By coordinating with McCarthy and Winand to tailor LSRA’s curriculum to meet LSRA’s mission standards, LSRA has been able to deliver a quality, state-approved curriculum to students participating in LSRA’s outdoor classroom experiences.
LSRA’s mission is a balancing act. As a licensed WATERKEEPER®, LSRA operates in three distinct buckets. The education bucket involves working with kids, community groups, and adults. LSRA informs and enlightens these groups on the importance of the river, the pollutants, and activities that lead to its degradation, and what individuals can do to protect it, while also offering a unique watershed experience. By providing education to students, LSRA aims to inspire the next generation to become stewards of the watershed.
The second bucket is community science, headed by Aaron Dixon, Program Coordinator for LSRA. Aaron samples for microplastics, bacteria, and other contaminants that result in water quality issues. LSRA also conducts monitoring for smallmouth bass, which showcases community science opportunities. This program provides the complex data people need to decide how safe the river is on any given day. By color-coding the results in red, yellow, and green, which denote bacterial levels in the river, people can decide for themselves whether they will go in or stay on shore.
The final and most crucial bucket is advocacy, and this falls within the purview of Ted Evgeniadis, Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper and LSRA’s Executive Director. Evgeniadis monitors pollution issues, policy changes, and initiates lawsuits against polluters, among other things, but wouldn’t be able to do so without the data LSRA collects, and equally important, the support of the community. By focusing on advocacy, LSRA ensures its priorities are aligned and avoids mission drift.
The mission of Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association is to improve the ecological health of the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed and the Chesapeake Bay. Current and future citizens of the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed deserve high water quality, wise and sustainable use of all aquatic resources, and preservation of the aesthetic value of our waterways. Improvement will occur through education, research, advocacy, and insistence on compliance with the law.
If you would like to get out on the river and learn more about the ecosystem and history of the Susquehanna and the surrounding watershed, sign up for a paddle tour.
If you would like to join this worthy cause, consider becoming a member or volunteer today.
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