The Silver Foundation 2005-6 Airshed Education Internship Program

The overarching goal of the airshed education program is to foster a long-term scientific collaboration between high schools and The University of Montana and to establish Montana high school students as regular and valuable contributors to our knowledge base about environmental public health science.

In July, 2005, The F. Morris and Helen Silver Foundation generously awarded $10,000 to the UM Center for Environmental Health Sciences to establish an undergraduate internship and to provide support for the Center’s airshed education program. This grant allowed the successful expansion of student research involvement in studies about the human health effects of indoor and outdoor air quality in western Montana during the 2005-6 academic year.

Background

The Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS) and the Department of Chemistry began working with Missoula high school science classes on a pilot project with one Big Sky High School student in the spring of 2004. The following year the program expanded into science classes at Hellgate and Corvallis high schools. The focus of the program was on sampling air toxics, a class of pollutants that includes benzene, xylene, toluene and several other chemical compounds, which have been shown to pose a hazard to human health.

The Silver Foundation award allowed the program to further expand by teaching students how to examine indoor and outdoor levels of particulate matter or PM. This contaminant is a significant source of pollution in western Montana due to our frequent valley inversions, use of woodburning stoves for household heating, increasingly dry, dusty summer weather conditions, and prolonged seasonal wildland fires. Students are now seeing a more complete picture of the range of pollutant types in our environment. To help them understand this complexity, faculty members and researchers regularly go into high school classrooms to deliver lectures about environmental triggers of respiratory disease and demonstrate the proper set-up of air sampling equipment.

Activities and Outcomes

The key CEHS faculty member responsible for the airshed ed program is Dr. Tony Ward, an atmospheric chemist and associate research professor at CEHS. His exposure assessment studies entail a great deal of travel to communities like Libby and Butte. Establishing an intern or understudy was an important requirement for him to be able to share his knowledge by delegating some of the logistical tasks and details associated with high school science outreach while still meeting his own, very active research agenda at CEHS.

Emily Weiler was selected as the Silver Foundation undergraduate intern because she embodies key characteristics of a successful academic pipeline candidate. Emily is a Missoula native and former student at Big Sky High School, now working her way through college as an undergraduate in chemistry. She showed an interest in developing the necessary laboratory and database skills related to the analysis of particulate matter. Her personality, background, and her willingness to take on the technical challenges of this work made her an ideal “near peer” and role model for the younger students involved in the program.

Emily used datasets gathered during the 2004-5 school year to prepare a poster presentation at the 20th National Conference for Undergraduate Research held in Asheville, NC, on April 6-8, 2006. In fact, she was the only undergraduate representative from The University of Montana at this important national gathering. Emily also presented her data on “VOC Emissions in Homes and its Effect on Personal Health” at the UM Conference on Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative activities in April. She is currently in the process of submitting a manuscript that summarizes her particulate matter research results to the International Journal of the Montana Academy of Sciences.

2006 High School Health Science Symposium

The students involved in the 2006 airshed education program worked in groups to analyze and compare their lab results, then gave PowerPoint presentations in front of an audience of about 100 of their peers and invited guests at the 2nd Annual Health Science High School Symposium held on the UM campus on May 17, 2006. The symposium marked the culmination of the year-long air sampling research activities for students from the participating high schools in the Missoula and Bitterroot valleys.

MCPS Superintendent Jim Clark with Bonnie Rouse, DEQ, and Ben Schmidt, Missoula City-County Health Dept.

Symposium sponsors included a local healthcare provider, Resources for Environmental and Occupational Health, and the MT Department of Environmental Quality. The keynote speaker was Dr. Joellen Lewtas, a professor at the University of Washington and nationally renowned expert on the health effects of combustion byproducts. Emily also addressed the symposium describing her internship, her role in the laboratory processing of all the sample tubes collected, and the importance of quality assurance/quality control to ensure data integrity.

Student presentations were judged by a panel of “celebrities” from the community: Mayor John Engen, meteorologists Mark Heyka and Russ Thomas, UM Coach Bobby Hauck, and chemistry professor Garon “G Wiz” Smith. MCAT camera personnel were on hand filming in the North Underground Lecture Hall. Student groups had posters, brochures and other information available.

The student groups presented their research data and findings with competence and ease. Moreover, all attendees had fun—there were plenty of moments of humor throughout the proceedings. The range of questions posed by participants demonstrated that they appreciated the different approaches and ways of viewing science problems among student groups at the various schools. As perhaps their first exposure to a professional science event in a university setting, this met another program objective by encouraging students to consider the health sciences as an attainable career choice.

A separate exhibit area was set up in the Skaggs Lobby area for student posters and environmental health displays from community organizations and state and federal agencies. Symposium evaluations by the students reflected positive attitudes about the importance and complexity of being able to clearly communicate scientific findings to fellow scientists as well as the public and policymakers.

Collaborations and Partnerships

The airshed program has led to some interesting and fruitful collaborations formed here on campus with other departments and programs. The Saturday Science Enrichment Program requested that CEHS host a group of Browning High School students from the Blackfeet Reservation. Using the very broad theme of “All Eyes on the Skies,” we designed an ambitious, interdisciplinary program that integrated science learning in the fields of astronomy, atmospheric chemistry, human physiology, environmental health, and geospatial remote sensing (GIS/GPS). Unfortunately, the program was scheduled to take place during spring break here on the UM campus making it very difficult to find faculty and student support to help run the program.

Emily provided training and prepared the materials for two Big Sky high school students to use in their well-received sectional on the analysis of particulate matter. The Browning students gave it high marks and one of our evaluators from Salish Kootenai College observed that it was one of the most effective sessions offered at the Saturday Academy in terms of the knowledge gained by all participants. Peer-led teaching clearly offers many benefits, and more of this teaching strategy will be incorporated in future programs.

Future Plans

CEHS and the Department of Chemistry are very committed to continuing the airshed sampling program in high schools. Recent changes in air quality monitoring standards have resulted in many more areas in Montana being cited for exceeding acceptable standards for particulate matter. Towns with significant PM problems are Missoula, Butte, Libby, Hamilton, Helena, Whitefish, and Kalispell. CEHS would like to include students from high schools in some of these outlying affected areas in our future outreach and education efforts. Emily Weiler’s work performed during her Silver Foundation internship provided a great deal of information that can serve as a springboard for conducting indoor particulate matter sampling on a larger scale.

A curriculum development workshop on incorporating environmental health science into K-12 education is scheduled for Aug 23-25, 2006. Approximately two dozen educators, community groups, and environmental health specialists are involved in the planning and implementation of this workshop. Faculty from the departments of chemistry, geology, and School of Education will join CEHS in delivering instruction at the workshop. Special emphasis will be on further developing the airshed sampling program at the high school level, figuring out ways to distill materials to other grade levels and schools, and integrating cultural content in ways that are consistent with Indian Education for All. We are very pleased to have expertise available through our collaboration with staff from Salish Kootenai College and Browning High School. These campus-community partnerships are essential to identify effective distance learning delivery methods and establish a mobile science lab for rural youth explore and better understand Montana's environmental public health priorities.