Lessons stream from watershed teacher

By Cathy Anderson
Special to The Seattle Times

	GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Blake Edwards, in shorts, a fifth-grader at Cedarhome Elementary near Stanwood, watches last week as fellow fifth-grader Kacie McCann takes a sample from a nearby creek. Watershed educator Suzi Wong Swint holds a container.
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Watershed educator Suzi Wong Swint eyeballs the fast-running waters of North Creek, searching for the best spot to pour out three buckets of what may be dying fish.

The best spot will revive them or sweep them away. Two dozen fifth-graders, their teacher and a small group of parents watch intently.

The students have raised these tiny coho salmon, nurturing them for four months in a tank in their school library. On this field trip, the group had planned to release the fish in another river. But then students began noticing fish lying sideways in the buckets, and organizers realized the battery-powered aerators had been left behind. These fish need oxygen — and fast.

To everyone's relief, the fish do indeed right themselves and swim away once they are poured into the creek.

To learn more The next Watershed Keepers class begins March 10. Call 425-388-6476 for details. Go to www.co.snohomish.wa.us /publicwk/swm/partners for information on the other community programs offered by Snohomish County's Surface Water Management Division.

Looking back, Swint laughed at the happy result.

"Those kids will never, ever forget that there's this invisible thing called dissolved oxygen in the water and that fish absolutely need it!"

For Swint, this was not a narrowly missed disaster but an obstacle turned into a learning opportunity. It's the kind of lesson she has made a career out of teaching.

A longtime civil servant, educator and environmentalist, Swint has spent the bulk of her career working within the unpredictable and sometimes conflicting classrooms of nature and government. Today, she uses lessons from both to help protect and preserve the environment.

Swint is a watershed educator for the Surface Water Management Division of the Snohomish County Public Works Department. With her colleagues, she conducts public-education programs on subjects such as flooding and drainage, and helps to coordinate restoration activities with a small team of watershed stewards. She tries to counter the distrust that some people have for government.

"People have this vision ... anyone who works for the county is someone to stay away from ... they're going to enforce on you somehow," she said.

A former landscape architect and campground planner for the U.S. Forest Service, Swint 10 years ago created the Watershed Keepers class, designed to teach citizens about water quality, how it affects fish and what people can do to help.

About 350 people have completed the 10-week course, an average of 35 students a year. Swint's strategy is to focus on a few people at a time.

"I have this philosophy that if we want cleaner water, more fish, our job is to motivate people to do something," she said.

Joan Lee, the director of the Surface Water Management Division, agreed. The work of Swint and other county employees involved in the program, she said, "is very much about prevention in terms of what individuals can do to make a difference through their day-to-day actions, about understanding local government and about volunteerism to improve our county's quality of life."

Julie Perrine took the Watershed Keepers class in 2000 and served on the county's Surface Water Management Committee the next year. Perrine said the course taught her about the science behind the water problems she was seeing in her neighborhood.

"I learned that the health of the creek really reflects the health of the community," she said. "It made me more aware of the footprint we leave and what it's doing to both water quality and salmon habitat."

Yet there's more than science involved. Lessons on how government works are a major component of Swint's program.

"You wouldn't think you'd come to Surface Water to learn about civics," Swint conceded.

But she has come to believe it's a necessary part of the curriculum. Her class includes lessons on how to look up county codes and how laws are established, in addition to strictly environmental subjects such as fish life cycles and the effects of pollution.

An in-class board game teaches students about the development process. Swint is intent on correcting the common misperception that developers operate outside the law "and everyone just lets them." For the most part, she said, developers meet the laws. So if citizens are unhappy with environmental impacts, the solution is not more enforcement.

"The solution is to change the laws," Swint said.

She thinks the timing for Snohomish County is critical. Parts of the county remain prone to "brand-new development," the kind that can have a big effect on fish.

Swint's outdoor classroom and her students make her hopeful about the future.

"People think salmon are just gone, and yet you can take them to urban streams and see healthy runs of sockeye and pinks and chums. Most people will never forget the first time they saw a fish in the river that's this big," Swint said, spreading her arms wide.

"But I get to do that — it's one of the best parts of my job!"

Cathy Anderson: snohomishcounty@seattletimes.com

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