Alexandria Students Explore Watersheds, Climate Action and Sustainability
By Ryan Freed
Alexandria, VA – What can students discover when their classroom becomes a local park, a stormwater pond becomes a science laboratory, and students become environmental investigators?
Through the City of Alexandria’s Meaningful Watershed Education Experience (MWEE) program, students explore local environmental challenges, collect scientific data, and discover how human-made solutions and everyday choices can improve environmental quality and build a more sustainable future—all while supporting the City’s Eco-City vision of inspiring informed environmental stewards and active community participants.
During the Watershed Walk, students investigate the Ben Brenman Pond Stormwater Management Retrofit Project, learning how stormwater infrastructure can help manage runoff and protect local waterways. Students also collect water-quality data, connecting observations in the field with the importance of monitoring and maintaining healthy ecosystems.
At the Eco-Investigation station, students become investigators, examining possible causes of a fish kill. By testing water for pH and nutrients, they discover how scientific evidence can help identify environmental concerns and guide solutions.
Students will explore how carbon cycles among the atmosphere, plants, animals, soil, and water, learning how healthy ecosystems help regulate our climate. Their challenge is to maximize potential carbon reductions within a limited impact budget, demonstrating how natural processes and individual and collective decisions can influence climate change.
At the invasive species station, students explore how nonnative (invasive) plants compete with native species for space and natural resources. Through an interactive simulation, students collect and graph data to see how invasive species can affect ecosystem balance. The activity also highlights prevention and management strategies, including planting native species, removing invasive plants, and educating the community.
The MWEE experience does not end there. Alexandria City Public School (ACPS) teachers integrate the Ben Brenman Park field trip into a comprehensive, project-based learning
unit. Students are driven by the central question, “How do human-made solutions improve our environment?” They identify real-world solutions in their own schoolyards. They connect these hands-on observations directly to core classroom concepts, including ecosystem functions, local wildlife populations, and environmental changes driven by both natural events and human activity.
Together, the stations and classroom project-based learning unit demonstrate the power of partnerships in sustainability education. By combining the City’s environmental expertise, data, and local sites with ACPS educators’ curriculum-aligned instruction, the collaboration connects real-world environmental goals with student learning and helps prepare the next generation of environmental stewards to support Alexandria’s sustainable future.
