Before eighth-grader Wess Donald and fifth-grader Katie McAleese went on a recent science field trip, they took a computer map-making class.

They were among 20 kids from St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf who went on a water-testing field trip along Deer Creek. The creek runs 9 1/2 miles from Creve Coeur to the River Des Peres in south St. Louis County. 

The St. Joseph kids are part of a group of 1,000 middle school students who are using computer software to map local watersheds. A watershed is the land area from which water drains into a single river or stream.

The field trip was part of special classes sponsored  by the Missouri Botanical Garden. 

Teacher Bob Coulter of the Garden said, “The classes help young students learn water-quality monitoring. They test water and use computers to make maps of the watershed and analyze results.” 

The first Deer Creek experiment was done last school year by two fifth-grade students from Forsyth School., with help from Coulter. They spent four months taking water samples from the creek to test changes in water quality.

They found water quality was worse as the creek came closer to the city. The changes were caused by sewage discharge, chemical pollution and soil erosion. 

Sister Laura Gruber of St. Joseph ran the first map-making class for her science students. She had them make a map of the state in which they live. 

Katie McAleese lives in Ballwin so she made a map of Missouri. 

But, Wess Donald is from the Bahamas and their map software didn’t include that island country. So Wess did his map of Egypt because he said he always wanted to go there. 

Both students said they liked computers as did most of the other St. Joseph youngsters. 

One of the things all the kids liked was the chance to get wet while collecting samples from Deer Creek. Sister Laura had thought of that. She urged the kids to bring a second pair to shoes so they’d have a dry pair later in the day.

Since she helped gather samples, she also needed a second pair of shoes.

Eighth-grader Scott Vinegar was one of the students who waded in to collect water samples. Kyle Padilla and Terrell Love collected a tube of water to check on how cloudy the water was. 

Then, teams of three kids waded into the creek trying to find living things in the water. One group found a crawdad, a minnow and two gilled snails. 

The St. Joseph students were making their second trip to Deer Creek. Last fall, they also collected water samples. This time, they compared those results with their new ones. 

Donald, McAleese and sixth-grader Shawn Clary are examples of youngsters who came to St. Joseph because of its fine reputation among deaf people. The school combines a good education with help for deaf kids to speak fluently, rather than rely on sign language.

Clary is from Logansport, Ind. McAleese’s family moved to St. Louis three years ago from Colorado so she could be close to the school. 

St. Joseph is one of 70 St. Louis area schools taking part in the Missouri Botanical Garden’s environmental classes at the Litzinger Ecology Center. Coulter coordinates the classes that study environmental science, chemistry, math and geography. 

The new computer software for watershed mapping provides a new dimension to this unique program.