Its a New Year of SMORE!

Texas SMORE with teacher Lollie Garay

SMORE is back for another year of discovery and challenge. The new school year brings new classrooms of students and new teachers together. Teacher Matt Conforti and his students from Barrow High School join SMORE AK. Coincidentally, his 9th grade students were last years 8th graders working with teacher Deb Greene. Sadly, Deb is unable to work with us this year, but will continue as a mentor to Matt. We look forward to working with Matt and his students in the Arctic!

Georgia Teacher Joy McCook is back with new classrooms of high school students and at this writing has already completed her fall sampling!  Read about it soon in her blog. Joy has also recruited fifth grade teacher Becky Busby from Frank Long Elementary to work with her students and Joy's in a local sampling collaboration. We are excited to have them  and look forward to reading more about them!

And of course, Texas is back with a new group of middle school students to carry on the work. Actually, we have five students who worked alongside the 8th graders last year doing the freshwater sampling  on the upper watershed. This year they'll work the Trinity Bay area all the way down to the Bolivar Peninsula. We are preparing for our first sampling to be done on Oct. 5.

For anyone reading this blog for the first time, there's history on how SMORE (Students Monitoring Ocean Response to Eutrophication) began in the archived blogs for 2011. Just scroll all the way down to the first one! 

I hope you'll continue to check in and read the blogs posted by our teams in Alaska, Texas  and Georgia  ( links are on the right hand side of this blog page). I've also provided links to webpages for the research scientists working with us on this ocean science project: Dr. Tish Yager, University of Georgia at Athens, and Dr. Marc Frischer, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography.

Back soon with a report on our first sampling !!!