The American Littoral Society has been working on a great project in partnership with the Vineland Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce. We’d love to share our progress so far! Rotary, the Chamber, and NJDEP reached out to us with the idea to do a rain barrel painting competition between the elementary schools in Vineland. The competition serves as a way to get the kids working together on a project, promote rain barrels as a way to save water outdoors, and a teaching tool for water conservation more generally.
The first step was to gather the supplies and put the barrels together. The Littoral Society and DEP provided the barrels, while Ace Plumbing in Vineland generously donated the other supplies. Then the Rotarians put it all together at one of their meetings.
Altogether we had enough barrels for all 12 elementary schools in Vineland, with a few left over that were sold to help pay for art supplies.
A few weeks later we were ready to begin our presentations to the schools. We had 7 presentations scheduled that first week, including all the 3rd-5th grade classes at D’Ippolito, Winslow, Barse, Mennies, Sabater, and Petway schools, plus the K-2nd graders at Barse. The rest of the schools, Durand, Rossi, Compass Academy, Bishop Schad, Cumberland Christian, and Saint Mary’s, we reached over the next few weeks. Our biggest group was about 350 kids!
I open by asking the kids some basic facts about water in the world, like that while over 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, less than 1% of that is liquid freshwater available for us to drink. Then we zoom in to our local area to talk about the Maurice River Watershed and Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer.
After all the new sciencey terms like watershed and aquifer, and how the aquifer and surface waters are connected, I like to mix it up a bit and make it more fun for the kids by shifting to talking about some of the wildlife that relies upon abundant freshwater here in South Jersey. They listen to some wildlife calls and try to identify what creature is making that sound:
Amphibians, including species found here in South Jersey such as the spring peeper, carpenter frog, fowler’s toad, and pine barrens tree frog, are particularly sensitive to changes in the water table because they, and in particular their eggs and tadpoles, live in very shallow pools of water. Even small changes due to overpumping the aquifer can have big impacts on their population.
We also talk about benthic macroinvertebrates and how you can tell the health of the stream based on which ones you find there.
After a reminder about how the aquifer provides most of the water for our lakes, rivers, streams, and wetlands, we talk about another creature that relies on clean and abundant water resources: humans!
After the kids name all the ways they can think of that they use water and how they can save water, we move on to the main event: rain barrels!
Where does the rain water usually go that falls on your roof? Well, it goes into the gutters, down the downspount, into the driveway, to the street, down the stormdrain, into your local stream or river, then down to the Delaware Bay.
There are all sorts of negative impacts on our freshwater ecosystems from increased stormwater runoff due to impervious surfaces. Using a rain barrel helps to prevent this by capturing and storing water before it becomes runoff.
This brings us to back to the project at hand: we want the kids to design and decorate a rain barrel for their school. The Vineland Chamber of Commerce’s motto “Love Where you Live” provided the theme for the designs. Students will have the option to incorporate one of three sub categories: history, recreation and agriculture. The students will have a few months to do this, with the final products being judged in May. First prize wins $500 for their school! Second prize is $300, and third prize is $200. Also, each school gets to keep their barrel to use in a school garden, to display, or to auction off as a fundraiser.
We would like to extend a special thanks to the Vineland Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce for making this project a success. We wish all of the students the best of luck in the competition and hope that they become lifelong South Jersey Watersavers!