It's was kinda overdue. We finally managed to sign an agreement with the public school here in Nanegal on a collaboration. We've been discussing this for a year now and two weeks ago the principal of the school approached us with concrete ideas on how a collaboration could look like.
We sprinkled in a lot of our own ideas and ... the agreement was signed.
We will be working with various groups of different ages. In some cases we will help students with specific projects which we will either do here in Nanegal or we will take them up to the lodge.
Other pieces of collaborations include talks, trainings and "park school events" at the school
In order not to lose time we started the first activity right away (i.e. last Friday). Two high school classes had to investigate water quality of a river right by the school. Since we are starting a project investigating river quality based on macroinvertebrates ourselves this was a great opportunity to practice this ourselves while at the same time kindling the students' interest in that topic.
It worked fairly well. We gave them a talk about river ecology and macroinvertebrates and then set out and explored the river. We found surprisingly many pollution intolerant critters, which means that that particular river is in a good state.
