Johnny Grady Jr. likes to get right to the heart of the matter. For example, when he decided to pursue an advanced degree he applied to the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences because the school here is the best of its kind.

And then to learn more about aquatic and land interactions, and stream organic matter dynamics, he selected that subject for his graduate research and began a series of trips to the far reaches of the Green River watershed to obtain samples and record fluxes over time.

Now that he’s had a chance to get acquainted with salmon and salmon habitat, he’s thinking about pursuing yet another advanced degree—this time, a Master of Public Affairs.

“The issues surrounding this resource aren’t just about how salmon live, they’re also about how people live, and about the public policies they live by.”

Johnny sees one way humans and salmon interact as a tour guide in the Salmon in the Classroom program. It brings thousands of children, mostly 4th and 5th graders, to the UW campus to observe the completion of one salmon run and to participate in the next.

The children are from public and private school classrooms equipped with special fish tanks designed to mimic conditions in salmon spawning streams. Kids raise the salmon eggs they get from the University and then, when the fry grow big enough, return them to streams.

Grady, who grew up in Georgia, far from the western slopes of the Cascade range, says his work here has given him hundreds of learning opportunities in addition to the scientific analyses associated with his graduate research program. Among those he finds most absorbing are Native American cultural practices, public policy analysis, stream restoration, and natural resource management.

he Salmon in the Classroom program started 20 years ago. I was teaching at Shoreline and had taken my class to visit the old Seattle Aquarium so they could see the salmon return, and the children seemed unusually curious and interested. So I decided to build an aquarium in our classroom. There were challenges, of course. Salmon need cold water, and that meant a refrigeration system. And we had to install pumps and filters to circulate clean water through the gravel bed to wash continuously over the eggs. But the complexity was a benefit because building and maintaining a system involves chemistry, mechanics, and other knowledge so students with different aptitudes could find a niche. The program has grown dramatically over the years with some 200 schools in the Lake Washington drainage basin involved and perhaps 750 classrooms from Alaska to California. The program has become a community-wide effort in King County. The University and the student volunteers are important, certainly. And Seattle Public Utilities administers tax-supported programs. But if you’re looking for heroes, go to the classroom teachers. They’ve added creativity and imagination. Lessons include art, Native American culture, habitat restoration, and hundreds of other subjects and activities. One lesson everyone learns is that the way to restore salmon runs is to restore natural habitat. That isn’t a lesson everyone wants to learn, of course. But it’s the one that raising salmon inevitably teaches.

Bob Boye
Teacher