Kentucky Watershed and Water Quality Education Project

This project has supported groups in two high priority watersheds during the first three years in various ways. At this point in the project, two watersheds will be selected for intense facilitation with stakeholders working through county agents to obtain names of the stakeholders. The Extension Associate and the Extension Water Quality Coordinator will facilitate the development of issuesand the formation of "issue teams". These issue teams will identify educational needs related to their issue throughout the watershed. Following the development and implementation of educational efforts, the Associate will help the stakeholders to begin the effort of implementing any plan in the watershed related to their identified issues or areas. Presently, forming partnerships with a number of groups and agencies in some watersheds has been explored with final watershed selection pending. In the selected watersheds a program called Watershed Academy for Teachers that incorporates the science of water quality into a 36 hour indoor-outdoor workshop will be offered, perhaps more than one per watershed ifthere is a high level of interest. The Extension Water Quality Coordinator will identify teacher participants at all levels in the formal education system and from organized home school efforts. Basic water education to all stakeholders and members of issue teams will be offered as a foundation for those participants interested in developing and implementing plans in their watershed. The basic water education program will be adapted by the Extension Associate from our volunteer-based Master Water Education Program. This program has a 25 hour workshop component using several instructors and resources. An additional educational effort will involve partnering with an existing state program to offer training to county and municipal officials in the selected watersheds. The Extension Associate will provide assistance in coordination and some materials development. The Extension Associate will continue to work with extending the KY-A-Syst (11 technical areas) and Home-A-Syst (9 technical areas) programs for self assessment in the selected watersheds. Our experience in the earlier years indicates that we also need to place more emphasis on simple suggestions and more extensive BMP' s for remediation of problems identified during the self-assessment. Watershed stakeholders and residents will be encouraged to review and use an earlier developed publication (Practical BMP's for Watersheds, ENRI-138). This publication resulted from a watershed partnership among Cooperative Extension, NRCS and a local conservation district. The Extension Associate will also handle updating of the Kentucky page of the Southern Region Water Quality website. Some of the items referred to at this site appear under the website maintained by the Environmental & Natural Resource Issues Task Force. These important items of interest are linked from the Kentucky page of the regional website (some of our important training materials appear on this site plus a list of our publications). The Extension Associate (100 %) and the Extension Water Quality Coordinator (8.3%) will be supported from this project in order to coordinate and facilitate proposed programs in the selected watersheds. Some reprinting ofENRI-138 will be needed. Travel for the Extension Associate and Water Quality Coordinator will be handled ITomcarryover funds. Requested travel funds will be used to send six participants to the Southern Region Water Quality Conference in October 2003. There will be some need to develop training materials and teaching aids to support the Watershed Academy, local official training and stakeholder basic water quality training. The project will develop, implement and summarize follow-up surveys to assess behavioral changes in the selected watersheds.