AFTER SCHOOL ALL STARS: Learning on the lake

Program gives valley students chance to sharpen science skills outside of the classroom

Clockwise from top, Sky McClain, right, a park ranger educator, leads students from Smith Elementary School and Squires Middle School on a hiking adventure at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, March 19, as part of the nonprofit organization After School All Stars. McClain shows historical Bureau of Reclamation photos of Hoover Dam. From left, Janeth Hernandez, Alex Robnett, Raul Corona and Jurain Villa listen while McClain shows how to operate the water trap, while Hal Edwards, back left, program coordinator, and Tammy Edwards look on. Raul Corona takes water samples. photos by vic valbuena bareng/view Clockwise from top, Sky McClain, right, a park ranger educator, leads students from Smith Elementary School and Squires Middle School on a hiking adventure at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, March 19, as part of the nonprofit organization After School All Stars. McClain shows historical Bureau of Reclamation photos of Hoover Dam. From left, Janeth Hernandez, Alex Robnett, Raul Corona and Jurain Villa listen while McClain shows how to operate the water trap, while Hal Edwards, back left, program coordinator, and Tammy Edwards look on. Raul Corona takes water samples. photos by vic valbuena bareng/view Clockwise from top, Sky McClain, right, a park ranger educator, leads students from Smith Elementary School and Squires Middle School on a hiking adventure at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, March 19, as part of the nonprofit organization After School All Stars. McClain shows historical Bureau of Reclamation photos of Hoover Dam. From left, Janeth Hernandez, Alex Robnett, Raul Corona and Jurain Villa listen while McClain shows how to operate the water trap, while Hal Edwards, back left, program coordinator, and Tammy Edwards look on. Raul Corona takes water samples. photos by vic valbuena bareng/view Clockwise from top, Sky McClain, right, a park ranger educator, leads students from Smith Elementary School and Squires Middle School on a hiking adventure at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, March 19, as part of the nonprofit organization After School All Stars. McClain shows historical Bureau of Reclamation photos of Hoover Dam. From left, Janeth Hernandez, Alex Robnett, Raul Corona and Jurain Villa listen while McClain shows how to operate the water trap, while Hal Edwards, back left, program coordinator, and Tammy Edwards look on. Raul Corona takes water samples. photos by vic valbuena bareng/view F. Andrew Taylor/viewStudents in the After School All Stars program hike among the wildflowers at Kingman Wash on the east shore of Lake Mead, March 19. Advertisement

Janeth Hernandez drops a two-toned weighted disc into the chilly water at Lake Mead. She plays out a rope attached to the disc, which is marked with a black line every meter. Her classmates peer overboard down into the depths of the great man-made lake. Janeth counts out as each black mark sinks past the surface. "Ten meters. Eleven, 12..."

Her classmates call back: "I can still see it" and "Me too." At 17 meters, it finally becomes impossible to discern the disk.

"All right," says UNLV's Daphne Sewing, "mark that down and let's get back inside to look at the plankton we've collected."

It's not a typical school day for the children of the After School All Stars, but it's one they'll never forget.

The After School All Stars is a nonprofit organization that provides after-school programs and youth summer camps for at-risk middle school children. It currently works with 15 schools across the Las Vegas Valley. The organization began as the Inner City Games Foundation in 1993. Three years ago, it changed its name, in part to reflect the wider range of activities it involves children in, such as a day on Lake Mead aboard the floating classroom and research vessel Forever Earth, which is not only the name of the boat, but also the program that runs on it.

Many of these more wide-ranging projects are done in conjunction with yet another organization, After School Lifetime Adventures, which works in concert with After School All Stars. After School Lifetime Adventures was founded by volunteer Hal Edwards, who created the group to provide experimental earth science and field trips for urban youth. "I wanted to do something for underserved youth," Edwards said. "The kids meet twice a week for classroom experiments, and then we try to get the urban minority youth into wild places as often as possible."

Sewing is Forever Earth's project manager. The program is operated by the Public Lands Institute of UNLV.

"It's a fairly new group on campus that's all about the conservation of public lands," Sewing said. "We do education, research and community outreach."

Forever Earth is a unique collaboration of several public institutions and private companies. The Southern Nevada Agency Partnership is involved and is made up of four federal agencies, which manage more than 7 million acres in Southern Nevada. Those agencies are the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service.

The nonprofit Outside Las Vegas Foundation was instrumental in bringing all the parties together and still obtains grants to help disadvantaged schools use Forever Earth.

The boat is owned by Forever Resorts, which operates the Marina at Callville Bay, as well as 13 others nationwide. It also builds houseboats, and the Forever Earth was built for the sole purpose of being an educational tool.

"The program was the vision of two executives of Forever Resorts," Sewing said.

The company maintains the boat and provides the crew. It is available for organizations, researchers, educators and groups that are involved with any or all of Forever Earth's programs purposes. Those purposes are environmental education, science research and environmental studies and water quality monitoring.

On March 19 at 9 a.m., 16 children from the program boarded the 70-foot custom houseboat at Callville Bay, about a dozen miles north of the entrance to Lake Mead National Park on Lake Mead Parkway. The day began with a leisurely cruise down the lake to pick up ranger Sky McClain, whose title is interpreter, essentially an educational ranger. She frequently works with the Forever Earth program.

"For the last two years, I've been funded by the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act money," McClain said. The act provides money for education and park projects through the sale of BLM land within a specific boundary around Las Vegas.

McClain and Sewing split the kids into two groups so they could conduct experiments in the front and back of the boat. In the front of the boat, McClain instructed the children in the use of an elaborate water collection device, which consisted of a weighted tube closed at both ends with rubber cones held in place by an elastic cord. The cones were pulled out and attached to a triggering mechanism. The collection device was lowered by a cord into the water. When it was at the desired depth, a brass ring was dropped down the cord causing the cones to snap into place, capturing the sample water. The children collected water from 2 and 5 meters and compared the pH levels.

At the stern, some of the children performed the test with the weighted disk to determine water clarity, while others collected miniscule creatures from the surface of the water with a net.

Back inside, drops of water from the net were placed on glass slides and viewed through a stereo microscope. A camera captured the images and showed the tiny plankton in great detail on a flat-screen monitor. The kids took turns identifying them with the help of a laminated sheet of pictures.

The kids climbed a narrow steel ladder to the top of the boat and under the shade of a canopy, McClain explained some of the history of the dam's construction and showed the students old photographs of the area before the dam was built. She challenged them to identify the hilltops in the photos as the islands they now are.

Around mid-day, the Forever Earth was beached at Kingman Wash, where a small bay provides camping, swimming and even restrooms for those who can get there by water or who brave the long, dirt road leading to it. Hot dogs were grilled on a barbecue on the boat, and everyone enjoyed a lunch before heading off on a hike through desert wildflowers. The flowers bloom for only a few weeks, but they seemed to be at their peak during the After School All Stars' visit.

"I think a lot of times, it's good that these programs just get kids out of their element," McClain said. "It gets them out into another part of nature that they maybe aren't quite as aware of when they're in the city. They aren't as aware of the wind or the sky or the clouds, but when you strip away all the city things, that's what remains, and I think it can cause a lot of relaxation than maybe just regular physical activity will do for them."

The boat pulled out once again, this time cruising down Black Canyon and turning slowly at the line of buoys that block vessels from approaching too close to the Hoover Dam. McClain took the opportunity to tell some more of the dam's history. Behind her, the intake towers of the dam stretched out of the water, around 120 feet below the white "bathtub ring," which shows the high-water mark from 15 years ago.

All good things must end, and as the boat took the long trip back to Callville Bay, watercolor paint and paper were brought out and the kids tried their hands at capturing their visions of the trip.

As the boat docked, each child was given a packet of items to commemorate the day. Water bottles, paints, publications and, of course, their paintings.

For more information, visit www.discovermojave.org or call 895-4890.