In Health Occupations Academy, students are offered numerous opportunities that outside students are not. One of them being the class Advanced Topics In Medical Science. In this class, students are exposed to debates and problems of the environment first semester, and health and medical issues second semester. Throughout first semester we engaged in multiple environmental issues, the biggest being water pollution. We started this unit by looking at frog deformities and the main cause of them. This led into the water pollution problem. We came across the issues of human pollution both chemically and physically. Mr. Lundquist introduced us to chemical testing first by going to the school's pond. Here we tested by only looking, not physically testing. We saw that the pond had an excessive amount of moss, meaning there were high phosphate levels in the water. This is caused by the lack of movement of the water and the fish's bowel movements, which produce phosphate. This experience gave us a taste of what the actual river walk was going to be like. During the time we were planning on doing our testing, there was a controversy between the Friends of the Fox and Fox Metro. The Friends of the Fox is a community formed group to protect the Fox River, and Fox Metro is Aurora's water treatment center. Friends of the Fox claim to have gotten much, much, higher levels of phosphate than Fox Metro had recorded. So we hoped that with our testing, we could find out ourselves which source had the right information We took a trip
             Students can make a difference! to where the Marina Valley Water Treatment Center effluent was found, then to the mouth of the Waubonsee Creek and the Fox River. Here we met Dr. David Horn and members of the Ecology Club from Aurora University. We split up into three different units. In one unit we did the actual testing on the Marina Valley effluent, then on the Waubonsee Creek water. In this unit we tested for nitr...