It is a job that this trio of seventh-graders at College Park Middle take very seriously, but they also have fun while doing it.
Wednesday morning was a little cold – and muddy in some parts – but Guilherme Santos, Kevin Gause and Jaidyn Redick were eager to board a golf cart driven by their seventh-grade science teacher Jered Crosby and venture out to the Limehouse Branch waterway behind their school.
Once they hopped off the golf cart, the three boys went right to work on emptying a device called a Water Goat from the canal.
A Water Goat is a floating surface net that collects trash as it drifts down a waterway. Berkeley County officials installed the device last summer with help from a grant. Berkeley County Stormwater Project Manager Thurman Simmons led the engineering project, which was done in partnership with Keep Berkeley County Beautiful.
The timing of the project was impeccable, because Crosby’s students had just done a quick-read of a book about making a difference, and he challenged them to come up with some ideas they could do to make an impact on their community. When Berkeley County reached out about installing the Water Goat, Crosby knew he had some students who would be up for the job.
“Mr. Crosby…came up to us three because we’re the type of people who like to do all this stuff,” Redick said, adding, “He asked if we would be into this kind of stuff, and we all said, ‘yeah.’ So he just…saw if we wanted to do it, and we did, and one day we just came out here and picked up the trash.”
These three students now lead what is called the Water Goat Passion Project. The idea is to treat the project as an after-school get-together that will meet up about once a week, and it is open to any other student who wants to participate in keeping the community clean.
“We’re trying to get more people involved with it to help us,” Redick said.
They have previously come out as a class to collect trash – “We got a lot of trash,” Gause recalled.
Crosby was named the school’s Teacher of the Year in the spring semester of 2020 and went on to be named a finalist for District Teacher of the Year later on. He is known for getting his students involved in projects that better their community; a year ago, he showed his students how to assemble “homeless car kits” to teach them a lesson on random acts of kindness.
Crosby called the Water Goat Passion Project the “poster child” of trying to get students motivated to collect trash around the school; after a month of his students being involved, he said they have noticed a lot less trash has gotten trapped in the Water Goat.
Crosby said his goal is to teach his students to be good people, and show them: “If they all work together, they can make a difference.”
The students assemble their collected trash into a bag and weigh it using a digital scale after each excursion. Over the past couple of months, they’ve collected more than 30 pounds of trash.
On Wednesday morning, they got just over 22 ounces. Crosby said they have been disappointed with collecting fewer amounts of trash, but also realized: this means they have been doing a good job and there is less litter.
“Our goal is we don’t want any trash in the net,” Crosby said.
The boys have recovered a lot of weird items from the waterway – a tire and a pumpkin particularly stood out to them.
The three of them said the hardest part of maintaining the Water Goat is simply pulling it out of the water, but they have a pretty good system set up to keep each other from falling into the water while they work; following a “one, two, three!” they work together to heave the goat out of the water and onto the ground. They will hold each other’s hands to help keep someone upright while using trash grabbers to retrieve any items from the water that the goat might have missed.
They also have a “prototype” of the Water Goat that they use to educate others on what the device does in the waterway. They made the prototype using a 3D printer at school, and used it to talk about the Water Goat at their school’s STEAM night event.
The students’ efforts were highlighted in a YouTube video Crosby previously posted. In the video, the students explain the purpose behind the Water Goat
“Our goal with this Water Goat is so we can show how easily trash gets here, and so people can pick up trash so it doesn’t get here,” Santos said in the video.
"Enthusiastic", "chills", "inspired", "amazed" – these were just a few of the words Thurman Simmons uses to describe the feeling he got witnessing the students work hard Wednesday morning.
"What they are creating, regarding the ripple effect in their lives, as well as in their community, touches everyone around them in a way they haven’t come to realize yet," Simmons said. "This is the ultimate goal as stewards of the environment: ensuring environmental protection and consciousness of natural resources for generations to come."
