As educators of young adults, we encourage our students to use their knowledge to take action and make a difference. Our students have been a Haw River Assembly monitoring group for four years, have written articles in the newspaper about solid-waste management and have been featured in a statewide DVD on water-quality best management practices.

Most community members know our students best for their state and national titles in the hydrogen fuel-cell competition. Our students are working on an exhibit to feature these cars at Chapel Hill's first Earth Action Day celebration.

Our work featured in the article headlined "Young scientists learn lesson in bureaucracy" on March 30 began when our students, while studying the water quality of Bolin Creek, observed the massive erosion occurring on the Duke Power corridor behind our school. While believing the abandoned corridor was on school property, we collaborated for months with town and county stormwater experts to devise best management practices for that area.

During this time, Orange County soil and water engineers surveyed the hill and proposed water bars as the best solution for curbing erosion. With their guidance, students wrote a grant to implement this solution.

After receiving funding, the Friends of Bolin Creek encouraged us to collaborate with the Carolina North forestry manager. This is when we learned that the erosion problem was on UNC's property. We continued our collaboration with the forestry manager for several months, receiving positive feedback to proceed.

After the Sediment Rangers proposal was presented to Sharon Myers, a geologist and environmental specialist at UNC, we received an e-mail stating that the level of involvement expected by UNC was unreasonable and that the grant money that we had for the project would not suffice. When we asked if we could proceed with our plans without UNC involvement, we never received feedback.

In Myers' April 6 Chapel Hill News response, "Why UNC does not want to use water bars to control erosion," she wrote that "IMBA [International Mountain Bike Association] strongly discourage the use of water bars on trails. The structures are difficult to ride and hike over and trail users tend to go around them, widening the trail and causing more erosion."

She also wrote that the waterbars would be unsafe for hikers and bikers. However, the area in question is more than a trail. It is also a service road for OWASA, Duke and school district maintenance vehicles. The cleared space is much larger than what a trail needs to be and the erosion that occurs on the side of the trail facing downhill is so extreme that the gulleys become impassible for both bikers and vehicles.

Our plan was to maintain a currently used 4-foot-wide section of the trail for pedestrian and bike traffic and to install vegetated, earthen water bars over the remaining width of the service road, specifically targeting the area prone to gulleys. The gently sloping earthen water bars, unlike the wooden ones Myers refers to on Carrboro's Adams Tract, would divert water into forested areas while still allowing for service vehicle traffic. The water bars would remain separate from the recreational trail so that hikers and bikers would still be able to enjoy this area without being impeded by them.

Myers only recently suggested to us the erosion control measures on Smith and Seawell School property that she included in her article. Some of these measures would take hundreds of thousands of dollars, a professional crew of contractors and many years to implement. Such solutions are not practical for student directed projects.

By the time such projects could be completed, our middle schoolers would be in college. Authentic experiences like the Sediment Rangers' project teaches students to be stewards of the environment and active contributors in the community, while fostering interest in environmental and science careers. The students' voices have been missing from this public discourse about the Sediment Rangers'project.

After reading Myers article, our students had several comments on the issue.

"It is important for the students to do this project because it teaches us how to manage these long term projects and improve on those skills. It also teaches us about environmental issues. The project has been student run from the very beginning with little help from the teachers. The entire project was even suggested by a student. Many of the students who worked on the actual writing of the grant would love to see it finished considering we have been waiting to start for over a year now." -- Francis Caraher, 2006-07 Smith eighth-grader

"Working on this project has been like working on a car. We planned the design, applied for the money, and gathered the supplies. To say we should ditch our plans and think up new ones, in new areas is like saying we should build a completely different type of car. We wrote the grant, we made a budget for which supplies we should buy, we did all of the manual labor not to mention collecting data and doing countless labs on the quality of the creek water. We did the work, which is why we should decide what to do with our hard-earned grant money." -- Caitlin Ball, 2006-07 Smith eighth-grader

"As a student, I see all the hard work and dedication that was put into this project. To see it come crashing down like this is devastating. I feel it is quite unfair to all people involved with the project for UNC not to have even given us a chance to explain to them our plan, how it will only be beneficial to everybody involved. I believe that UNC should collaborate with Smith Middle School and become 'environmental partners' to help preserve Bolin Creek. It would be great if UNC would let Smith Middle School follow through with their project, and place water bars in safe areas on the Carolina North property, which would undoubtedly prove to be advantageous to everybody who uses the forest trails." -- Cameron Imani, 2007-08 Smith eighth-grader