Bob Boye
Teacher, Shoreline School District

The 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 docents 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.