Three students from Medford Memorial Middle School on June 21 began a presentation to town council members with a story. Like any good story, they opened with the infamous phrase, “once upon a time,” and drew back on the formation of their beloved school organization, the Community Science Education program, in 2014.
Although having just completed their eighth-grade school year and duration in middle school, Jamie Miller, Isabella Turner and Brielle Willoughby explained that CSEP was created, designed and implemented by Medford Memorial School’s students, and has been tailored for the Medford community to increase the scientific literacy of its citizens. It has also allowed students the opportunity to apply their classroom educations to real-world situations and scenarios.
While the students themselves can be credited with much of CSEP’s success over the past three years, they also have the Medford Education Foundation to thank for providing them with a generous grant in 2014. This money was used to purchase the equipment necessary to be successful in the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program and to meet its protocols.
“That ‘and’ in the program’s name means a lot more than you may think. It means that students have the opportunity to do real science with real scientists, and not just learn about it in the classroom,” Miller said.
In the effort to expand their own scientific awareness while simultaneously sharing this knowledge with the community, CSEPers, as they call themselves, have participated in a number of NASA-based projects, including the NASA Global Participation Measurement campaign where they helped take ground measurements of precipitation to compare the data of the NASA satellite.
Other NASA-based campaigns the CSEP students have participated in include the Soil Moisture Active Passive campaign, through which students then took actual ground measurements of the soil moisture in the first five centimeters of the ground to compare to satellite data. They have also worked on an El Nino campaign focusing on the weather phenomenon that occurs every three to seven years when the normally cool waters of the east Pacific become warmer, impacting weather around the globe.
In addition to working on these campaigns, CSEP students have worked with science professionals, attended the Rutgers University Teen Climate Summit and worked with major industry leaders such as Weatherbug.com and the United Soybean Board Partnership to further develop as junior scientists.
Despite all of the success CSEPS has been achieving as an organization, last year’s student members felt more could be done to help guide the community to scientific literacy. For this reason, and to dramatically increase their public outreach efforts, they organized the first ever Medford Science Summit. This event was greeted with such large success that it was held again this year on June 4. With more than 200 Medford citizens in attendance, the 2016 summit was equally successful.
“I think the Medford Science Summit was really cool because so many different people from our town, people that I hadn’t ever seen, they came out and we were able to teach them,” Turner said.
After three years and all that they have accomplished, CSEP voiced at the council meeting that they are now ready to take the next steps, however these steps would include a partnership with council. While the town council’s website has nothing truly science related on it, according to the three CSEP students, they believe all members of the community have the responsibility to promote outreach efforts and help to make sure all citizens are scientifically literate in a community that is well informed.
“To me, outreach means reaching out to others, teaching them and helping them to understand why what we’re talking about is important,” Willoughby said. “I think this information is important because we’re talking about serious and real topics while helping to improve the community’s scientific literacy. It’s really important for them to be literate.”
Thus, this partnership would enable CSEP to use the help of council in organizing and advertising the 2017 Medford Science Summit. In return for its assistance, CSEP plans to provide 15–20 junior scientists to the community who are ready to teach. They also have a tentative agreement with NASA to do a live chat from the International Space Station with the community.
The three students expressed to the council members that, in a perfect world, they would like council to approve their request by September 2017 so the new group of CSEPers and the Medford Science Committee can begin planning for 2017 to hold the best science summit yet.
“At the beginning, I started with once upon a time, and every good story has a moral, so the moral of the story is: Students can make a difference, we are improving scientific literacy around the globe and with your help we can make an even bigger impact,” Miller said.
Mayor Jeffrey Beenstock applauded the girls on their presentation and accomplishments and said they have made it clear that Medford’s scientific future is bright. He also said council will talk over the proposal in the weeks to come, but was very proud of what he has seen so far.
