At the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute (PCEI), 14 dedicated employees and more than 15 AmeriCorps members are hard at work addressing environmental concerns. With a recent $6,000.00 grant from Inland Northwest Community Foundation, PCEI is developing outcomes-based evaluation measures for a Municipal Water Conservation Education Program. One component of the education program works with kids, teenagers, and adults in the Moscow and Pullman area. This project came about due to concern about the declining water levels in the Grande Ronde aquifer.

All of the water in Moscow comes from the Wanapum and Grande Ronde aquifers while the city of Pullman gets its water from the Grande Ronde aquifer. The Grande Ronde aquifer has declined one to two feet per year for the last 70 years. This is of great concern to the area.

During the 2007-2008 school year, every 5^th grader in the public school system in the area, including the charter school, learned about the aquifer, watersheds and the importance of water conservation. In the ninth grade, students took a pre- and post-test during a two-day educational program through PCEI. Each student took a pledge to conserve water and was required to grade themselves one month later. At PCEI, they want to know if the kids will follow-up on pledges when they are asked to make a promise.

Jenica Wood-Beauchamp, the Education Program Manager at PCEI, is currently looking at results and measuring effectiveness of the education program. “If there are behavioral and attitude changes then that shift will lead to greater conservation,” Wood-Beauchamp explained. “This grant is critical for us because short term we get to find out specifically about our water conservation education efforts and how our education may ultimately affect the residents’ knowledge, behavior and values. Long term our ability to measure outcomes several different ways helps us develop evaluation instruments that we might use for other programs in the future.”