Canadian, U.S. Classes Study Acid Rain Effects

Linda bounced into the room with a graduated cylinder that held a tiny amount of rainwater. Her 23 classmates whipped out weather charts and began the daily ritual: type of precipitation, pattern, contaminants.

It was no mere weather report that occupied the pupils at Pape Public School in Toronto, but a six-week acid rain monitoring program involving grade-school children in all of Canada and the 16 U.S. border states.

Its aims are to get accurate readings on acid rain levels over a wide area of the two countries, while making the young aware of environmental issues in general and acid rain in particular.

“It introduces kids into doing a scientific project like, this and it helps raise some grass-roots awareness in Canada,” said Steve Smith, executive director of Public Focus, a nonprofit environmental education organization in Toronto that runs the Backyard Acid Rain Kit program, called BARK.

“Acid rain, specifically, is an issue of considerable concern to Canadians,” he said.

Nadia Miller, who teaches the class at Pape, uses the program to instill observation in her pupils. In field trips, they examine trees and buildings that may be suffering the effects of acid rain.

“You have to teach the kids to look, to see the world around them,” Miller said.

BARK also works its way into class discussions on temperate rain forests and dovetails into the extensive recycling program run completely by the children at Pape school.

“This is all part of environmental awareness,” Miller said.

The program involves 827 classrooms in Canada and 592 in the United States, and all the schools are twinned. Most of the Canadian classes have an American counterpart with which they exchange results and other information.

Linda had just made the daily trip to the roof to fetch the cylinder, which had collected 1 millimeter of rain. The class determined what sort of precipitation it was--rain drizzle, hail, snow--whether it was continuous or intermittent, sky and wind conditions, the degree of acidity and what contaminants were present: bird droppings, insects, dirt, leaves.

For the acidity test, Linda took one of the pH strips provided in the simple kit by Public Focus and dunked it in the rainwater as the rest of the class gathered in a circle on the floor. The paper came up dark olive green, which an accompanying comparison chart said was 5.5 pH, or little acidity.

Martin, an intense redhead, explained that “pH is a scale of measuring acidity and alkalinity; 5.0 to 5.6 is normal rain.”

A classmate said: “One day we got a 7.5, but we did it in the afternoon and the wind was a south wind.”

What does it all mean?

“Maybe on some days industry is less active,” Martin mused.

“Or the wind direction might be different,” one of the girls offered.

The discussion was serious. Miller urged her pupils to analyze what they were doing and draw conclusions.

She said the Pape school class participated in last year’s BARK pilot run, which involved only Ontario and three American states, and the children would like to continue the work all year. Data-gathering for BARK ends this month.

All the information will be fed to BARK headquarters for processing and tabulation. The results will be computer-mapped and color-coded by Queen’s University in Kingston and each class will get a copy of the map.

“One of the values of the results is that the kids receive the maps,” Smith said.

“They see they’ve contributed to something, not just read about something that others have done. Those kids are far more likely as adults to feel motivated to take part and do something.”