GARDEN GROVE : Anytown Has Youth on Its Side

Things have been rough for Anytown, Calif., for the last few months.

Its beaches and rivers have been fouled by oil and toxic waste spills. The local timber industry is clashing with environmentalists over the fate of the spotted owl. Its once-blue skies are increasingly tainted with smog.

Still, the story of this unlucky fictional town may get a happy ending, as long as a group of third- and fourth-grade students can come up with realistic solutions to Anytown’s problems.

The 38 students, all members of a GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program run by the Garden Grove Unified School District, are exploring complex man-made and natural problems that plague real communities, said Sandi Poochigian, one of the teachers.

Twice a week since February, students from 11 schools have met at Peters Elementary School to discuss ecology and run related experiments. Students also have created a series of six-foot-tall booths covered with magazine photos and posters which depict life in the fictional Northern California town. One side of the booth shows the problems, the other side depicts their solutions.

Nikki Mesa, 9, of Garden Grove, talks about Anytown as if she has been there: “There’s lots of wildlife and oceans and lots of rocks to climb on and a lot of trees. It’s really sad (that) all these things happened to it.”

Nikki, a fourth-grade student at Patton Elementary, lamented the town’s misfortune on Wednesday, saying: “It’s been really, really hard because of all the disasters, they’re complicated disasters and we’re only kids.”

Still, she added that her classmates’ proposed solutions for the town’s ills are “going to help a lot. We can keep on making money so the economy doesn’t go bad (and) everything will be just like it was, or pretty close.”

During the course of the program, students have gathered information about the environment and Anytown’s problems by conducting experiments, constructing displays and listening to guest lecturers, including representatives of the Air Quality Management District, a local trash-hauling company and the Audubon Society.

In one corner of the room is a display called “Fred Is Dead,” which chronicles the poisoning of a fictional fish by trash, oil and detergent. Nearby is a sponge cut into a fish shape covered in a fish bowl along with a sludge composed of the materials that killed Fred. Other student projects include displays showing that plants grow poorly when their water is mixed with various adulterants, such as vinegar.

The program will culminate on June 16 when students present recommendations to their parents and teachers during a “town meeting,” Poochigian said.

On Wednesday, the students prepared their proposals for fixing the city’s problems. For example, one group made a list showing the pros and cons of restricting logging in the area. On the plus side, the threat to the spotted owl would be diminished, on the minus side was the loss in loggers’ jobs. The students proposed that loggers be retrained for other jobs and that the city promote itself as a tourist center to recoup lost dollars to the economy and create jobs.

“I learned a lot of stuff,” said Mana Tahaie, 10, of Fountain Valley. “It’s pretty fun to make our own little town and get to run it.”

Still, when it comes to real environmental problems, “Parents and adults don’t listen to kids even though we have good ideas,” she added. “We think kids can make a difference.”