MESA COUNTY — Throughout Jamie Somerville’s middle school classroom, ideas were taking shape. Big ideas.
On a mid-April day, students cut styrofoam into pieces with a band saw. A 3D printer hummed in the corner. A cluster of eighth graders chattered about their project’s design behind a laptop screen.
At a time of historic drought and deepening water shortages across the West, they were focused on an ambitious goal: Solving some of the Colorado River Basin’s longstanding problems. Their tools? Pencils, mud, Jell-O and a lot of persistence.
Mount Garfield Middle School, between the communities of Clifton and Palisade, has been working its way toward joining the ranks of International Baccalaureate schools in Mesa County and around the world. The global educational foundation designs programs that call on students to take a hands-on role in their studies and schools to rethink how they approach curriculums. This year, Mount Garfield reworked its woodshop class to meet the foundation’s criteria, turning it into a hub of brainstorming and trial and error focused on the Colorado River.
Somerville, the school’s tech education teacher, designed the course.
“I wanted the kids to come up with solutions for the river,” he said. “It couldn’t be negotiable. It couldn’t be deals. It had to be engineering solutions.”
The first step: Identify the problem — and there are a host of options.
Over the past 25 years, a prolonged drought has shrunk the Colorado River Basin’s water supply. Rising temperatures impact how water flows through the basin and evaporates from its reservoirs.
In the past decade, the basin captured the nation’s attention with memorable images of bathtub rings — white bands of rock discolored by minerals in the water — that drove home how depleted lakes Powell and Mead had become. The two reservoirs, the largest in the country, are critical to managing the water supply for about 40 million people across the West.
“I never actually knew about all the problems on the Colorado River until I came to this class and started learning about it,” Avreigh Dunn, 14, said. “It’s much more serious than I thought.”
A group of students in Jamie Somerville’s eighth grad tech ed class use a computer to design plans for a model of irrigation canals that would use water from the Colorado River. From left to right are Peyton Carson, 14, of Clifton; Kaislee Fazzio, 15, of De Beque; and Avreigh Dunn 14, also of Clifton. (Gretel Daugherty/Special to the Colorado Sun)Federal and state officials have, so far, failed to negotiate a new set of rules to manage the two reservoirs, despite a looming deadline. The previous rules, established in 2007, will expire this fall.
Both legal threats and tensions are rising as state, tribal and federal officials are being forced to consider water cuts — and the pain they cause to communities, economies, cultures and environments.
It’s a lot for eight graders to take on. But it’s also the perfect subject for a class that takes place less than a mile from the river itself.
“Out here, our (river) system is in crisis. We’re not taking it seriously,” Somerville said. “When I thought about a very real problem that this generation is going to live with for the rest of their lives, that struck me as very appropriate.”
Creating a curriculum
Mount Garfield is working to meet criteria for the International Baccalaureate’s Middle Years Program, which aims to help students make connections between their studies and the real world.
A local elementary school is pursuing another one of the foundation’s programs. Because Palisade High School is already part of the global network, local students could eventually take part in its programs from kindergarten to the end of high school, Somerville said.
Some research indicates that International Baccalaureate programs result in higher levels of critical thinking and higher graduation rates. The programs can also exacerbate separation between the “haves” and “have-nots” in school systems, especially when they are more common in wealthier, academically powerful areas.
In Palisade, high school students have graduated with two years of college credits under their belts and some have gone on to Ivy League universities. The school has become a magnet because of it, Somerville said.
As a former English and civics teacher, Somerville went on his own educational journey while building the curriculum to meet International Baccalaureate standards. He took the vocational skills taught in a woodshop class and focused them on a concept: fixing engineering problems in the Colorado River Basin.
Groups of students picked problem areas. If evaporation is an issue, how do you stop it? If Lake Powell’s water level falls too low to be released through Glen Canyon Dam, how do you fix that?
They researched what solutions have already been attempted. Somerville taught the students how to do root cause analyses, a systematic process for identifying problems’ underlying causes.
Somerville pulled in heavy hitters on Colorado water issues, he said, holding a list with dozens of names scrawled on it. His guest speakers and resources were some of the best of the best in the business.
Scott McInnis, a former U.S. Representative for Colorado, visited to speak about the law of the river, the interstate compacts, legislation and judicial decisions that determine how the Colorado River is shared among people and groups with often conflicting interests.
“It’s hard to understand people’s point of views,” Makynzye Shelton, 14, said. “It’s kind of hard to find the in-between. It makes it hard to decide what to do for your project because you don’t know what side you want to be on.”
Farmers and ranchers talked about irrigation water issues, beef production and peach crops. Researchers, like Perry Cabot of Colorado State University, talked about the science of water management, heard the students’ ideas and offered feedback.
Somerville reached out to architects — including the person who designed the school in 1982 — to understand the mechanics of their design processes and incorporated that into the class. He sought guidance from real engineers. (You can’t re-drill through reinforced concrete — back to the drawing board!)
The most common question from students: Why can’t we take water from California?
“My message is that finger pointing is not productive,” Somerville said. “That everybody feels a valid entitlement to what they’re legally getting from water. I’ve wanted them to understand both sides of it.”
Cayleann Gutowski, 14, of Whitewater researches the best plants to grow in gardens on floating cork in irrigation canals to prevent evaporation as displayed in the model she has built. The students in Jamie Somerville’s eighth grade Tech Ed class at Mt. Garfield Middle School are working on various designs to help save the Colorado River, its water and the wildlife that depend on the river. (Gretel Daugherty/Special to the Colorado Sun)Sticks, cork, saws — oh my!
As other groups cut, drilled and glued their projects together, Jayden Bocanegra, 14, carefully arranged his styrofoam model of Glen Canyon Dam, talking over the roar of a saw ripping through wood in the background.
Jayden Bocanegra, 14, of Clifton uses a styrofoam model of Glen Canyon dam to describe how his design concept would allow the Colorado River’s water to continue flowing downstream in the event Lake Powell reaches dead pool status during an eighth-grade Tech Ed class at Mt. Garfield Middle School. (Gretel Daugherty/Special to the Colorado Sun)Water can’t be released through the dam when the water falls too low, so his group planned to drill bypass tunnels around the dam to release water, he said, pulling plastic pieces (and a Jolly Rancher) out of his pocket to show how the tunnels will be represented in the model.
“These are just going to go into the canyon calls,” Bocanegra said, pointing at the styrofoam model, “and then come down to the river level and shoot out water.”
For most of the students, it was a journey to get to this point. Each time they found an idea they liked, they got feedback, recognized flaws and returned to the drawing board. Over and over.
For 14-year-old Kaislee Fazzio, the process proved challenging.
“We had an idea, but once they (guest speakers) would come in, they would change our idea, and we’d be so confused,” she said.
By April, most groups were well on their way to completing their projects with a month left in the school year.
One group focused on the buildup of silt at the inlet of Lake Powell, which has limited the flow of water into the reservoir and its storage capacity. The students designed floating drills, modeled after oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, to pump the silt, load it onto barges and repurpose it.
Other students worked to make irrigation more efficient. They designed biodegradable nanochips made from styrofoam and equipped with wings inspired by the seeds of an elm tree. Planes could drop the nanochips onto fields to gather highly accurate data about nutrients and water usage, Somerville said.
“I feel like it was hard to find an idea at first to focus on because people have tried so many things to help improve the river,” Franklin Siler, 13, said.
Some designed gray water systems that would help people reuse water more efficiently at home and at desert resorts. Others, like Cayleann Gutowski, 14, wanted to float cork wood covered with plants, like floating gardens, on the surface of canals and reservoirs to reduce evaporation.
“I’ve liked learning and researching about the river and learning about all the problems that are happening,” she said. “(Somerville) keeps telling us that we know more than the adults in our lives, probably.”
The woodshop was bustling as students worked to wrap up their projects. Somerville hustled from group to group, answering questions, helping with the table saw or drill press, offering gentle reminders for the students to listen to each other’s ideas.
Epoxy resin canals dried on tables across the room from mud-spattered models of a new design for beaver dams. When the bell rang, students rushed past posters on the wall outlining the International Baccalaureate goals.
In the quiet of a planning period, Somerville talked about his future goals for the class. Maybe they’ll do a science fair, so if students want to focus on desalinating water, their project will actually remove the salt from the water.
And while the class will continue to focus on the Colorado River, its purpose goes beyond the boundaries of the basin. Somerville hopes it changes the way students approach solving thorny issues.
“If they can apply that to any problem that they deal with in life — to where you come up with something new to make it better — that’s the learning,” Somerville said. “That’s a different type of problem solving.”
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