Hands-on science program puts South Bay students in an outdoor classroom

Pioneer High School teacher Rob Zaccheo credits much of the 30-year success of BioSITE — a Children’s Discovery Museum science program — to its ability to get students in touch with the environment.

“I think it’s really important to have programs like BioSITE because the connection with nature is starting to get smaller and smaller. We live in a digital age, everything’s streaming, and there’s been a loss of connection. The biggest impact is to get us all out here,” he said. “It’s really important sometimes to get students outside the four walls of the classroom.”

There were no walls for the class he was at Wednesday afternoon. He kept a watchful eye as his high school students worked with fourth-graders from Allen at Steinbeck Elementary on the banks of the Guadalupe River off Almaden Expressway in South San Jose. One of their goals for the day was to collect insects at the water’s edge, identifying them to see if they were species that tended to be more or less tolerant of pollution. Lots of bugs in the less-tolerant category was good news as it meant the river was in better shape, ecologically.

Gabby Plante, a 10th-grader at Pioneer, was one of the high schoolers helping students find macroinvertebrates — watershed insects in their larval stages. She became involved with BioSITE on the recommendation of her older sister, who had been through the program when she was a student.

“I like working with kids, especially teaching them about the environment. They always seem so interested and excited, and I get to learn stuff at the same time they do,” Plante said. “I get to learn about different types of birds and fish and their impact on the river and the riparian zone in general.”

The Pioneer mentors meet with students from three elementary schools a total of 21 times during the academic year, using lesson plans they develop themselves. Besides finding insects, they work in teams to learn about plants and animals that live in the watershed, collect and test water samples and see how people impact the environment. (Sometimes people have a positive effect, Zaccheo noted, as the area they were exploring Wednesday was part of a restoration project two decades ago and is now thriving with native growth.)

BioSITE — the last part is an acronym for “Students Investigating The Environment” — started in the 1993-94 school year and was directed for many years by Sandy Derby. Nearly 26,000 students from 40 schools, mostly in the San Jose Unified School District, have taken part in the field research program since then. BioSITE has been partially funded by Oracle and PwC for the past 14 years.

Zaccheo says students who have been through the program as fourth- or fifth-graders talk about its impact or want to become BioSITE leaders themselves.

“There’s a mentorship between the high school students and the elementary students,” he said. “They get so much from watching them as role models, and you hope that connection is something they take with them outside of BioSITE.”

CELEBRATE THE 408: The sixth annual San Jose Day celebration is taking place Saturday with a street fair in Japantown. It will include live music and dance performances, an art exhibition, food trucks and local vendors and a huge art exhibition at Empire Seven Studios, 525 N. Seventh St.

The free, nonprofit event, which runs from noon to 6 p.m., also caps off the first week of #WeCreate408, a prompt-driven challenge throughout the month of April that aims to bring out the creativity in San Jose residents. The activities Saturday will include a workshop with San Jose Creative Ambassador Rayos Magos on a printmaking process called a collagraph.