Students at the Miquon School in Conshohocken receive award for stream project
The Schuylkill Action Network presented a Protecting Our Water Award to 5th and 6th grade students at The Miquon School this week for their work protecting the river and drinking water in the Schuylkill River Valley. An award ceremony recognized the school for its work restoring a section of its creek and included presentations by Rick Rogers, acting deputy director of the Water Protection Division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Mid-Atlantic Office, Virginia Vassalotti of the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary and Miquon students.
An integral part of its outdoor and science curriculum, the Miquon Creek is a first order tributary to the Schuylkill River and provides students with a multitude of opportunities for hands-on learning and exploration. Decades of mill farming, development in the watershed and severe weather events significantly degraded the creek’s ecosystem health. Recent storm surges, causing noticeable erosion and creek bank loss, led Miquon into a campaign to restore the creek — an effort entailing constructing a series of riffles and pools in the steam and creating shallow aquatic beds to mitigate erosion during large storm events.