When Parker Charter School students returned from April vacation this year (coincidentally on Earth Day), they were met with covered-over drinking fountains and pallets of bottled water in the hallways. While they were on break, the discovery of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in all three of Devens’ public wells prompted MassDevelopment to provide Parker and other schools, businesses, and organizations in Devens with bottled water. While both students and teachers were dismayed by the news their water was not safe to drink, first-year Parker teacher and Bromfield graduate Jamie Kendall also saw the situation as an opportunity.
Kendall teaches the science portion of the math, science, and technology class for students in two sections of “division two,” a group composed of ninth- and 10th-graders at Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens. Her co-teacher, Dawn Crane, teaches the math portion. In an interview with the Press, Kendall said she and Crane were teaching a sustainability unit last spring, and the plan when returning from April break was to begin teaching about how nitrogen and phosphorus cycle through Earth’s environment, plants, and animals.
But Kendall and Crane decided fate might be pointing them in another direction, so they gave students a choice: stick with the original plan or learn about the factors that led to hundreds of bottles of water in their hallways. Both sections of the class voted for the latter.
Kendall said she immediately realized that even though her background was in earth science and she knew a lot about groundwater and aquifers, she knew relatively little about PFAS. But the first thing classes did was to use sticky notes to brainstorm what questions needed to be answered, and that helped Kendall structure the unit. Students wanted to know where their drinking water came from, what was in it, who was in charge of making sure it was safe to drink, and how contaminated water can be cleaned.
No Jack and Jill
When Kendall told students that many of them probably had wells at their houses, they denied it. She realized they were thinking about the small round structures with a roof and a hand crank, as seen in illustrations of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme. But she showed them a computer animation of drilling a well, which included images of wellheads, and that prompted recognition among the students.
Classes then learned about water quality in their towns by reading the town’s public water supply Consumer Confidence Report, required annually by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for every community water system in the country. That project was suited well to Parker, which has students from 40 towns in north central Massachusetts, and Kendall said the ability to compare reports among the students helped to spark their interest in the content. She said they were horrified to see elements such as arsenic in their water and equally horrified by the long chemical names of the byproducts of chlorination in the water from towns that treat their water.
To interpret the results, students learned how the EPA regulates contaminants in drinking water from public water supplies. But they were shocked that no testing is required for water from private wells, which many of them now realized they had. Kendall said one student told her parents they had to stop giving the dog tap water because they didn’t know what contaminants might be in it.
PFAS and other contaminants
Kendall said when the class moved on to PFAS, she explained the causes of PFAS contamination at Devens, the ongoing testing, and what is being done to treat the water. She said, “It was so obvious to them that putting chemicals on the ground and then drinking the water that came from underneath that ground was a bad idea.” She provided students with maps of Devens’ aquifers, available from the Massachusetts Bureau of Geographic Information, and assigned students the task of locating Devens’ three wells, MacPherson, Patton, and Shabokin. Students then labeled the wells with PFAS levels using test results posted by the Army on ftdevens.org.
Classes also visited the Devens wastewater treatment plant, where Kendall said they learned that, unlike most plants that discharge to surface water, Devens treats the wastewater and discharges it to groundwater. She said the students had a hard time with the wastewater-to-aquifer concept, but once they understood how the settling pools at the plant worked to remove contamination from the water, they were more accepting of the process.
Then it was time to learn about cleaning water firsthand. Kendall created simulated stream and flood water and showed students how to measure pH, turbidity, and total dissolved solids. She then asked them to develop a water treatment method to treat for those three factors and evaluate the method’s success. Based on EPA standards for those three factors, students chose what standard they would try to reach using methods such as coffee filters, sand, activated carbon, and even settling, which they had learned about at the wastewater treatment plant.
When the water treatment assignment was over, Kendall said the students had a new appreciation for how difficult it is to clean water, especially for a contaminant like PFAS, which has to be cleaned to less than 20 parts per trillion to meet the state’s new proposed standard. She showed the students slides of the design of the PFAS treatment plant being built at the Grove Pond wells in Ayer, and she said they thought it was “very fair” that the Army was paying for the plant.
Too many bottles
Todd Sumner, Parker’s principal, said when MassDevelopment began delivering single-serving bottles last April, the school was using about 2,200 bottles water per week. He said students immediately recognized the solid waste problem with that system, and a working group of students and teachers was formed to identify and recommend alternatives. As a result, the school switched to water chillers and large water jugs later in the spring, and this fall all students and teachers were provided with a refillable water bottle.
The number of plastic bottles the school was going through before the switch had an impact on Kendall and Crane’s sustainability students. When it came time to choose a final project, Kendall said, most students chose to investigate the effects of plastic water bottles on the environment. And they never did get to the phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, but Kendall said that by looking at PFAS and other contaminants in groundwater, students did understand how permanent pollution of Earth’s systems can be. “We spilled PFAS and it didn’t go away,” she said.
