Students restore oysters in Hudson River

Your donation will help NYC students learn about the environment and each other. We want to start a community oyster restoration/research project at the Hudson River. With your support, we will be able to participate in the Billion Oyster Project. Our two neighborhood schools, PS 3 and City-As-School High school have oyster tanks in our schools and we are eager to put the oysters into oyster traps in the Hudson River this spring to help clean the river water and for us to study the ecology of the river by inspecting the traps regularly. 

1. Continue to monitor and maintain our classroom tanks.

2. Deploy the oyster traps on May 22nd.

3. Visit the oyster traps on Tuesdays to measure the oysters, observe the plankton and other organisms and measure the water quality. 

4. Continue maintaining and monitoring the traps through the spring, summer, and fall.

5. Bring some oysters back into the classroom tanks for continued study in the winter of 2019.

6. Return them in the spring to the traps. 

The project addresses both a social and an environmental problem. The obvious environmental problem is improving the Hudson River's water quality and bringing environmental awareness to students through hands-on investigations and stewardship. This project also has a meaningful social element as it brings students from different grades (high school and elementary) together to share their research and their understandings. This allows the high school students to be leaders in their investigation as they share their insight with the younger students who naturally listen to teens and look up to them as older peers. The high school students benefit from interacting with the younger students.  High school students often tell me that it is nice to be reminded of the joy, awe, and curiosity that they had when they were young before they felt the pressure of "growing up."