Ventura River Ecosystem: Watershed Education

Friday, December 8, 2023

Watershed Education

For more than a decade, Once Upon a Watershed has provided environmental education to local schools. The program introduces our watershed to hundreds of students every year both in the classroom and field trips along the river. This originated from "Once upon a Wetland" engaging students in hands-on restoration at the Ojai Meadows Preserve and featured in Watershed Revolution. This locally produced film was aired nationwide on PBS.

The current program is housed under The CREW, which has secured a permit from County government to take groups of students and others up to the obsolete Matilija Dam.

The tours also help demonstrate why the dam, located on 400 acres owned by the County of Ventura, needs to come down. “The single most important thing for the health of the Ventura River watershed is to remove Matilija Dam,” White said.
Despite the Ventura County Board of Supervisors approving the removal of the dam in 1998, said White, “the fact that we’re still here 25 years later looking at this big slab of concrete is somewhat frustrating.”
Not only does the dam block sediment from moving downstream and replenishing the beaches, it blocks passage of endangered southern steelhead, White told students.
What’s more, sediment backfilling the dam has tailed back so far that, in places, it’s actually made the creek higher than the access road into the canyon. “So whenever there is a flood the road gets taken out,” White said, “and that’s problematic for the people who are living in Matilija Canyon, because it’s one road in and out.” During January’s heavy downpours, residents had to be flown in and out of the canyon by helicopter.
Nearly all the public schools Once Upon a Watershed works with are Title 1 schools, “which indicates they’re in a disadvantaged or low income community,” said White, who takes fourth-, fifth- and six-graders to different places in the watershed. “We’re based in Ojai and so we run programs primarily in the Ventura River watershed.”
Once Upon a Watershed is funded by grants and operates on an annual budget of approximately $100,000, White said. OVS has been highly supportive of the program, he added.
“It’s such an important thing for young people to understand where our water comes from,” said sixth-grade teacher Ryan Lang, who grew up in Matilija Canyon and still resides there.