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Grade 9 students from Westview Freedom Academy were doing university-level science on a recent field trip to the Freshwater Restoration Ecology Centre in LaSalle.

The centre is part of the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and their outing was organized by the »ÆÉ«Ö±²¥ Student Success team with funding for the transportation covered under experiential learning.

The students’ experience, under the direction of Dr. Trevor Pitcher, was not an experiment, it was real science, similar to the work being carried out daily at the centre and in line with the bio-diversity strand of the Grade 9 Science curriculum. They studied how road salt, used freely every winter on roads, driveways and parking lots, impacts the local environment – specifically the freshwater lakes, rivers and streams in the region.

Their investigation gave them insights into the practicalities of the field and introduced them to a potential educational and professional pathway.