Floating Classroom with Global Field Academy Microschool

Overview

On Tuesday, May 14th, 2024, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted a floating classroom and coastal cleanup for 18 students and 16 parent educators from Global Field Academy Microschool aboard DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen in our beloved Biscayne Bay. We met our students and chaperones at Bill Bird Marina and made our way through Biscayne Bay to the mouth of Oleta River while discussing how the local watershed functions and results in different types of pollution in the bay. Using Earth Echo water challenge kits, students and chaperones had the opportunity to get their hands on some real science by measuring water quality parameters temperature, turbidity, pH, and dissolved oxygen level and hypothesizing why these parameters may change throughout the Bay. Unfortunately, we have continued to see low dissolved oxygen levels for several weeks while the temperatures continue to rise heading into the summertime here in South Florida. As our students learned, prolonged low oxygen levels combined with increasing heat and opportunities for pollution during the rainy season can put Biscayne Bay at risk of harmful algal blooms (HABs) and fish kills. Luckily, we are just entering the summer "fertilizer blackout" period for Miami-Dade County, a policy that was created to help combat the risks of declining Bay health due to nutrient pollution.

Following our water quality testing and watershed discussions, we brought the West Miami Middle students to Sandspur Island, a local, man-made picnic island in the Bay, and had a beach cleanup where we enthusiastically collected 20 pounds of trash and made sightings of local wildlife throughout the shoreline. We finished up our floating classroom by identifying the most common (and uncommon) types of trash we found and how we could prevent those types of materials from entering the environment as a result of our everyday choices.

We hope that the students from Global Field Academy Microschool were able to leave the floating classroom with a better understanding of how people impact the health of local and global waterways and how we can minimize our influence on the health of the environment around us through small changes to our daily actions.