Photo by Jessica Pascoe, Sustainability Director with National Great Rivers Research and Educational Center. October 2, 2008 in Jersey Co, IL. Rob Simmonds, Carterville National Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, provides input to high school students working to address the Asian carp issue on the Upper Mississippi River.

The Upper Mississippi River (UMR) Education Program was established in 2007 by representatives of the National Great Rivers Research & Education Center, Sierra Club, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, and Prairie Rivers Network. Its goal is to introduce a comprehensive curriculum on the UMR in high schools along the Mississippi River. Several area schools are participating using curriculum information developed by this committee. In addition, they spend a morning at Melvin Price Locks & Dam/National Great Rivers Museum where the students tour the facilities. They then spend an afternoon at a local venue where they work in a professional setting developing "river issue solutions." This session mimics a real-world civic experience where students from two schools work together to form consensus, utilizing requested input from the experts in their critical thinking process, and then present their solutions to the group. In our October session, Rob Simmonds, Project Leader of the Carterville National Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, participated as an invasive species "expert." The 60 high school students were assisted by such local river experts and college student facilitators, working together to develop possible solutions to some of the UMR’s most difficult environmental problems: Asian carp, floodplain connectivity, and the Gulf of Mexico ‘dead zone.’ Some of the creative solutions to deal with Asian carp included using a combination of biological or chemical controls, community fishing contests up and down the river on certain days, and developing processing plants for animal feed or export. It was great to see these students struggle through tough issues as they developed critical thinking skills and an appreciation for the complexity of community and environmental issues in their back yards.