Plastic bottles. Juice boxes. Baby diapers.
These are just a few of the items students at both Calvin Donaldson Elementary in Chattanooga and Dame Pearlette Louisy Primary — 2,000 miles away in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia — found in the streams near their schools.
Students at Calvin Donaldson are working with WaterWays, a local nonprofit organization focused on watershed health and restoration, on a litter reduction project to improve water quality in Chattanooga Creek.
WaterWays was started in 2004 by Signal Mountain resident Mary Beth Sutton as a small student-based organization in St. Lucia. Focused on watershed health and protection, WaterWays is now an international organization based in Chattanooga.
(READ MORE: Cleanup set after dumping in Chattanooga Creek)
The organization still has an office in St. Lucia, where it started a program with local students. They are working to fund a litter boom, a litter collection device, to place in a river to look at what kinds of trash it contains and where it's coming from, Sutton said by phone.
The students are collecting trash around their schools along with conducting their own trash audits to keep track of what kinds of trash they are creating themselves, she said.
Earlier this year, WaterWays received a grant from the American Water Charitable Foundation to work with fourth graders on a similar project in the Chattanooga Creek watershed.
"Our property is located on a wetland, and we have access to it, and the kids have always been curious about where it comes from and how it affects the environment," teacher Ryan Burns, whose fourth grade students at Calvin Donaldson are participating in the project, said in an interview. "So when I met with WaterWays, they had a great idea on how to teach our kids how to preserve the water sources that we have."
WaterWays staff had the idea to bring the groups of students from Chattanooga and St. Lucia together through a Zoom meeting.
Along with sharing the types of trash they collected, students talked about the flooding that occurs around both of their schools. They also asked each other for ideas on how to clean up their waterways and prevent flooding.
"It's just been a really nice coalescing of our work to see both groups of kids working on the same projects," Sutton said. "The kids at Calvin Donaldson will see that there are kids that look like them and act like them and are doing the same things that they are in a different country. I just think that's wonderful."
(READ MORE: Plastic waste fills much of Chattanooga creek)
In the next few weeks, the Calvin Donaldson students will complete their trash audits and take a field trip to Audubon Acres, where they will see what a healthy stream looks like, Sutton said.
The students are also writing and illustrating their own stories about Chattanooga Creek — which the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1990s called one of the most polluted creeks in the country — a tributary of which runs through Calvin Donaldson's campus.
"It gives the kids most of all an opportunity to get outside, interact with nature," Burns said.
Contact Emily Crisman at ecrisman@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6508.