Durango, New Delhi students form teams across oceans to take on water issues ...Middle East

DURANGO — At 7 a.m. on a snowy Saturday, Durango middle school students started popping into a video classroom ready to work on a water presentation with their partners 8,790 miles away in New Delhi, India.

“Remember, the goal of today is to start working on that slideshow,” Lu Boren, agriculture teacher at Escalante Middle School, told the students.

“Yeah, anyone can give suggestions,” one student at the Delhi International School Edge in India told her group.

Separated by oceans, time zones, language and lifestyles, the students work together to learn about water issues in their local watersheds, the Colorado River and Yamuna River. Over two years, they organized panels of experts, did acidity tests and learned about their own water use. Their projects went beyond learning about water quality and scarcity: They found similarities, processed differences, navigated technology challenges and even got better at teamwork. 

The collaboration was born out of a panel at an education and technology conference featuring the JDO Foundation, a nonprofit located in Littleton that helps connect schools around the world, Boren said.

Starting in fall 2024, the foundation connected the two classes and supplied them with staff support and a curriculum about freshwater around the world. They learned about watersheds, their water sources and sustainability.

The teachers like the program so much they decided to continue for a second year, they said.

The students in Durango, located in southwestern Colorado, focused on water scarcity in their home watersheds and the Colorado River Basin. The basin supplies water to 40 million people across seven states, 30 tribal nations and part of Mexico. But that supply has been shrinking as temperatures warm and human demands have been too slow to adapt.

“I want them to know there’s not an unending supply of fresh water,” Boren said. “We have to figure out how to conserve water for future generations.”

In New Delhi, the students learned about the Yamuna River, where sewage, industrial waste, agricultural runoff and other pollutants have tanked the river’s water quality to the point that some call it a dead river.

But the lessons went beyond just water, Geeta Devlal, science teacher at the Delhi international school said. 

“It was a great opportunity for my students. They learned a lot about different cultures, diversity. I could see teamwork — they learned how to connect with people with barriers of language and time,” she said. 

At first, the transcontinental collab was a reach: The schools’ time zones are 12 and a half hours apart, so during collaboration days, one class was often meeting at 7 a.m. while the other was meeting at 7:30 p.m.

It was hard to understand each other’s accents. Sometimes the school curricula, holidays and calendars didn’t line up, the teachers said. The students in New Delhi were younger, mostly 11 and 12, while the Durango students were 13 or 14.

Sometimes the teamwork was frustrating, with students talking over each other or accidentally erasing someone’s text, students said. But they also realized they loved the same famous soccer players, games, books and movies, like “The Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movie.

“It was really nice coexisting with the Colorado students as they were really patient throughout the program,” said Aaradhy Mukherjee, 12, who participated in the first year of the program. 

In Durango, some kids talked to Indian students for the first time and learned about festivals there that can last for weeks with dancing and parades in the streets, said Sawyer Smith, 13, who is part of the program’s second year.

“It’s been pretty cool,” he said. “We learned about some of their cultural practices and what a day in the life looks like as a kid who lives in New Delhi.”

They were struck by the differences in how each community uses water. In southwestern Colorado, students and their families were using 1,500 to 5,000 gallons of water per day, the students said. 

Mukherjee, like many of his classmates, used much less, about 3 gallons, or 12 liters, of water every few days, he said.

The big difference? Washing cars, watering lawns and taking long showers is way more common in the United States. Many of the New Delhi students relied on public transit, instead of family cars, and used buckets to shower.

“It’s kind of crazy,” Escalante student Logan Whitman, 13, said. “I thought I would use at maximum two or three gallons because I don’t drink that much water personally.”

Each year, the students try to figure out how to solve issues in their basin.

During the program’s first year, the New Delhi students went to the Yamuna River, some for the first time. The school principal canceled the trip several times because of safety concerns because the water is so polluted before Devlal was able to make the trip happen.

The students donned gloves and did pH tests. The class was surprised by the smell wafting off the water, asking if it was actually a safe water supply. It is treated before it reaches homes, and the river’s condition has since improved, but the trip was a real-world learning experience, Devlal said. 

“When they went there, they saw the real situation,” she said. “Then they learned, and then they were like, yes, we have to do something.”

That’s part of the focus of the program: When these water problems have no end in sight, what can students do to find solutions?

Both schools created public service announcements to spread the word. (“Every drop matters!” “Save the riverrrr!!” they said.) Students at both schools reached out to local water experts, came up with questions and stepped in front of a crowd of their peers and guests to host a panel on water issues.

In her classroom on a December afternoon, Boren took a pause to collect herself. By doing the panel, and the whole collaboration, she saw the students grow. Step out of their comfort zones; become local citizens.

It struck a chord, she said. 

“The students walked out of that event last year just feeling 10-feet tall and feeling like they can make a difference,” she said of the panel. “Watching them take that on is huge.”

Hence then, the article about durango new delhi students form teams across oceans to take on water issues was published today ( Friday 26/12/2025 - 01:35 PM ) and is available on Colorado Sun ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

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