Sixteen-year old Jaleesa Freeman certainly got the attention of Lattrel Jones and Ja’leah Swift as she helped transform the vest pocket park at Chapel and Day streets into an outdoor learning center about the New Haven watershed.
“What are the two kinds of pollution?” she asked Lattrel. “Point source and not-point source,” responded Lattrel, proud of his answer as he should be for a kid just going into the first grade at the Beecher School. Ja’leah was impressed with water molecules, and how they adhere to surfaces. “It’s called cohesion.” She explained that’s accomplished through hydrogen bonding. This remarkable learning is taking place under the auspices of Solar Youth, a five-year-old year-round New Haven youth mentoring, public service, and leadership organization that teaches kids about the environment.. 
Founded by Joanne Sciulli (second from right in the photo), a Brooklynite who went to Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and then fell in love with New Haven and its kids, Solar Youth this summer has initiated Citycology, a six-week program, which employs nine New Haven teens, like Jaleesa, to train and then teach hands-on lessons about water and watersheds, particularly in New Haven. It’s funded, in part, by the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection Long Island Sound License Plate Fund. So if you have paid $50 for one of those handsome Connecticut license plates that have a lighthouse on them, go out and polish it and feel good that funds so provided are paying for Citycology. There are about 75 kids in Solar Youth’s program this summer, and 300 in total are taught annually in after-school programs Solar Youth runs at the Barnard Environmental Studies and John Martinez schools, among others. “In Citycology for five weeks the kids learn and then teach their younger peers the science curriculum used in the schools,” said Sciulli. “But this last week, Jaleesa and the other youth educators, as we call them, are challenged to devise their own lessons to review what they’ve taught, and to have fun.” 
Which is why 15-year-old Tyrone Davis and Luquaia Melton, who go to West Haven High and Wilbur Cross respectively, were playing “Wheel of Water” with their charges.
Question: What state of matter is precipitation in? a) liquid and solid; b) gas and liquid; c) solid and gas. The answer is … Luquaia, like most of the youth educators in Solar Youth programs, was once a kid on the receiving end of the lessons. The part of the program she’s enjoyed most is working with the kids. However, she’d never thought much about water, she said, until she came to study it this summer, and, as those of us who have taught know, there is no learning more intense that that which is a prelude to teaching it. “I never once in my life,” she said, “thought about how water sticks to a penny. But now I know about cohesion. It’s amazing.” She aspires to go to Yale, but even if they take her, she says, she may turn the hometown ivy down. “I’ve lived in New Haven all my life. I’d like to see some other place.” 
Under the trees and across the grass Tatiana Winn was doing her teaching through a watershed skit, complete with on-the-street interviews with kids, such as seven-year old Nyzhae. Did she just happen to know the three headwaters in New Haven? Yes! East Rock, West Rock, and Sleeping Giant. Congratulations! “Kids learn something about pollution in school,” said Tatiana after the skit had concluded, “but they don’t learn about the role water plays in our lives every day.” All the kids, the little ones as well as the youth educators, explained Sciulli, take what they learn and bring it back into their schools and communities. Jaleesa Freeman’s students, for example, were making pictures about the role of water, and the pictures will form the basis of a calendar they will create and then distribute. “All the kids learn to identify an environmental problem in, for example, their school or community, to study it, and help find a solution. There are a terrific number of really wonderful kids in New Haven,” she said, “and we’re trying to grow Solar Youth as an organization so as to provide ongoing employment and other opportunities for them.” 
Your reporter was going to finish by providing the answer to the Wheel of Water question posed above. However, instead, let’s join Tyrone and the Citycology trio to sing the New Haven rivers song, written by Tyrone Davis, which I learned today. Ready? All together now: