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Making the most of the river At Tappahannock's St. Margaret's School, nature program relies on its neighbor, the Rappahannock
By ROB HEDELT ONE WEEK, but three different set- tings where students at St. Mar- garet's School, on the banks of the Rappahannock River in Tappahannock, learn about marine life and science in a revamped river program: Senior Yoo Ri Jung thinks she's correctly identified arrow arrum, a prevalent wetland plant, when she sees it on a kayak trip along the pristine Dragon Run in Essex and Middlesex counties. When ecology teacher Mollie Conklin paddles up, she gives Jung, who calls Korea home, a way to double-check. "See the leaves, how they're sharp, shaped like an arrow?" she asks. "Another meaning for the word 'sharp' is a taste that's intense. Bite a small piece and see if it seems that way" Ten seconds later, the warmth on Jung's tongue makes an impression that's sure to last. A few days later, on Hoskins Creek in Tappahannock, ninth-grader Sherelle Tate strides out onto a small dock to take readings for dissolved oxygen. Battling biting flies that make doing anything difficult, the student in teacher Milly Rixey's environmental-science class isn't deterred by the flies or the crowd taking readings on nitrogen, salinity and more. Soon enough, Tate, from Lanham, Md., reports: "plenty of oxygen in this water." In a classroom with a wall of windows a stone's throw from the Rappahannock, senior Jessica Hinson stares intently at the dogfish shark on a dissection tray before her in teacher Connie Grimm's marine-biology class. Struggling to open an incision made by fellow senior Suzanne Atchison, Hinson, a day student from Farnham in Richmond County, sheds her rubber gloves. "That's better," she says, using a pair of dissecting scissors to open the shark's belly. "Which one of these is the liver?" Head of School Margaret R. Broad says the school's river studies got a boost in 1999 when a strategic-planning group urged using the river as one of the school's top five priorities. "You don't have to go back too far to hear stories of the school's prohibition against even dipping a toe in the river," said Broad. "But the new river program and its use in all classes and curriculums has changed all that."
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