Welcome Aboard the Floating Classrooms of Grand Traverse Bay

Aug. 7, 2015

If you want to see how the Inland Seas Education Association (ISEA) has influenced young people over its 25 years, simply take a look at the nonprofit organization’s executive director.

Fred Sitkins assumed his role at ISEA in October 2013, but his relationship to the organization began 25 years earlier when he worked as a deckhand on the tall ship Malibar and helped out with classes.

"I was doing that and going to college, trying to figure out what I was doing with my life, and I saw this unique experience occurring and I just loved it. I watched kids learn and all I could think about was, "˜Man, why wasn’t school like that for me?’ I hated school," Sitkins said.

AUTHENTIC LABORATORY ON THE BAY

Sitkins was inspired to become at teacher. He earned a master’s in school administration and was principal at Boyne City Elementary for 13 years. Then, the lake came calling.

He hadn’t planned a career change, but when ISEA founder Tom Kelly announced he would retire on Jan. 1, 2014, Sitkins applied for the job.

"I just saw this as kind of a full-circle opportunity for me to come back and do something different," he said.

What Sitkins saw happening in an ISEA classroom in 1990 was similar to what someone would observe at the organization today.

"Our goal is to make it real, live-action research, so that we can involve our students and make it kind of a real, authentic learning experience, as opposed to having this thing that they do that doesn’t mean anything," Sitkins said.

At a minimum, they want to spark students’ interest in the health of the Great Lakes and they hope to inspire some to go further.

"The hope – really our grandiose, pie-inthe-sky goal – is that we will inspire these kids to consider science as a career," he said. "So they see what a scientist does and say, "˜Wow, that’s actually kind of cool. That looks fun. This looks interesting.’"

THE STORY OF INVASIVE SPECIES

The result of 25 years of hands-on, practical science experiments by ISEA students is that the organization has accumulated a massive amount of data.

Students participating in ISEA expeditions have collected data on water quality, water clarity, species diversity and, most recently, microplastics levels.

"A lot of things have been changing in the Great Lakes over the years, but one of the most dramatic changes is within that feeder fish population and it’s a direct result of the invasives that we’ve been struggling with over these years – the zebra mussels, then the quagga mussels came on the heels of that, and now the round gobies," Sitkins said. "We’ve got a 25-year dataset to tell that story."

The data is considered scientifically significant despite the fact that it was recorded by children as young as elementary age.

"It is student-collected data, so there’s going to be more noise in the data, but because we have such a huge data set, you can look back and you can see how the water clarity changed and how the invasive species came in and how they spread," Kelly said.

BIG, GRADUAL REVELATIONS

There was never one particular moment when students conducted an experiment aboard the Inland Seas and made a sudden, startling discovery, but significant discoveries have emerged over time.

They’ve collected data that demonstrates how round gobies have crowded out almost every other species of feeder fish; they’ve chronicled how invasives have sucked up most of the plankton, eliminating an important food source while making the water much clearer.

"Anybody that sees that trend data is awestruck," Sitkins said. "I mean, we’ve gone from, in 1989, an average of being able to see six meters, or about 18 feet, and now we’re getting on average 14 and 15 meters in the spring," he said. "You’re seeing 45 feet into the water now."

ISEA students are also working on a new issue: the presence of broken down microscopic pieces of plastic in the Great Lakes. They work with one of the nation’s leading researchers of microplastics, a professor at State University of New York in Fredonia. They collect water samples and conduct preliminary tests, then send the samples to New York for further study.

The experiments will measure how prevalent microplastics are in Lake Michigan, Sitkins explained. Researchers want to know whether microplastic levels fluctuate across seasons and to what degree they have entered the food chain.

HISTORY OF THE SEAS

ISEA was born in 1989 with help from the Traverse Tall Ship Co., which leased the tall ship Malibar as a floating classroom in the early years, Kelly explained.

ISEA commissioned its own ship, the Inland Seas, which launched in 1994, but the nonprofit’s relationship with the private sailing company has continued. The Malibar was long ago sold to another company, but today ISEA leases time for students aboard the tall ship Manitou.

Kelly, who is a part-time ISEA ship captain in his retirement, said his inspiration for founding ISEA came from another group.

"It was really an idea that I stole, or borrowed or something, from the Hudson River Clearwater Organization," Kelly said.

Kelly, who had an environmental science and charter sailing background, spent a month with Clearwater before he launched ISEA.

"I was so taken with what they did. I thought, "˜Man, we ought to have something like this in the Great Lakes,’" he said. "When I started out, basically we had a blank sheet of paper and I took that and ran with it for 25 years."

Kelly said the mission of ISEA has always been to get young people interested in science and the Great Lakes. The huge dataset that’s been generated on the health of the Great Lakes is a happy side effect.

FROM ISEA TO FRESHWATER PHD

Emily Tyner’s first experience with Inland Seas was as a middle school student whose Ann Arbor class took a field trip aboard the school ship. The summer before college she interned at ISEA and she spent another three summers working for the organization.

"Before I went to college, I really thought I was going to be pre-med," Tyner said. "It changed my direction and I went on a more environmental and marine sciences route."

Today, the 31-year-old is working on a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s School of Fresh Water Sciences. She’s been working with the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore to study how invasive species are linked to avian botulism.

Tyner said ISEA programs are tremendously effective at getting students interested in the Great Lakes.

"It’s really powerful having that experiential, hands-on learning," she said. "It is really an invaluable way to teach science."

She said it is especially useful for students who don’t grow up boating on the Great Lakes.

"There’s so much more to Lake Michigan than what you’re seeing at the shore or what you're seeing at the beach," she said.

RED8BOATWORKS AT SEA

Scientific experiments will get some students interested in the Great Lakes, while other students require a different approach to spark their interest.

Enter RED8 Boatworks, a nonprofit organization collaborating with ISEA and using boatbuilding to facilitate the same outcomes ISEA hopes to achieve via its school ship programs.

"I think that’s what Fred realizes. This is a group of people who can become stewards of the lakes that aren’t going to get turned on by the science," said RED8 founder Adam Burks. "It’s a potential tool to reach another audience."

Burks, who graduated from the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building in Port Townsend, Washington, and who has taught boatbuilding at the Great Lakes Boat Building School in Cedarville in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, has been working with students at Traverse City West Middle School for several years and he hopes to expand the program to other schools.

The program is designed for students to learn boatbuilding basics. They get together in small groups after school and build a stand up paddleboard (SUP) or a canoe. Burks said those projects are big enough to teach students real-world skills, but aren’t so big they’re out of reach.

"You can’t just throw 14-year-olds out and ask them to restore a Chris Craft," Burks said. "It takes years and years of skills. It’s not an easy thing to do."

RED8 also offers more ambitious boatbuilding programs geared for adults through ISEA.

FIVE-PERSON SUP

Burks and his students built a dozen regular SUPs, two multi-person SUPs and three canoes. They built one giant SUP that can carry five riders. Many of the boats have been auctioned to raise money for the program. Others are used to teach boating.

While students may ultimately decide they want to be boatbuilders, that’s not the point of the program.

"It’s not my intention to turn anyone into a boatbuilder," Burks said.

Friends and West Middle School students Chase Troast, 14, and Yibanny Rijo, 13, said they got into boatbuilding because they hoped it would lead to learning how to build skateboards.

"One day I was talking to my counselor and she told me about it and I asked Yibanny if he wanted to do it and that’s how we got into it," Troast said.

For Rijo, it sounded like a fun after school activity. He’d never signed up for an after school program before and he was excited to learn how to build boats.

"Me and my dad, we usually do a lot of fishing," Rijo said. "When I heard about the boating project, I thought I would actually know what to do if I wanted to build a paddle board or a regular boat for him."

NEW GENERATION OF VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

Sitkins would like to see more students return to ISEA programs two or three times – in elementary, middle and high school.

Up to 5,000 students take part in an ISEA program aboard the Inland Seas or the Manitou each year and they are taught by 120 volunteer instructors who use a program aligned with the Michigan curriculum expectations for science and social studies.

"On average, most kids, depending on where they’re from, unfortunately only go through once," he said. "That’s our goal is to change that around, so we’ve developed a broader array of programs. We realize that our main mission is developing a stewardship of the Great Lakes and that can’t just happen with one exposure, as magical as we think this experience is."

ISEA developed a funding model where costs are covered by individual donors, grants and fees paid by schools, but that math hasn’t always added up.

For example, a half-day program aboard the Inland Seas costs the organization $2,400. ISEA would like to charge schools only $825.

"That third that schools were requested to pay, since school budgets have been a disaster over this last decade, we’ve supplemented a large percentage of those schools, so they’ve either paid a much smaller amount or didn’t pay anything," Sitkins said. "That’s starting to rebound. School budgets are starting to recover."

ISEA is also hoping to expand its network of donors and volunteers, many of whom have been with ISEA from the beginning.

"We need more volunteers, so we are in heavy recruiting mode right now, looking for more volunteers, more donors," Sitkins said. "It’s really important that we start to replenish that base."