University faculty and staff would design a core of hands-on monitoring activities and serve as project organizers and advisors in each community. These hands-on sessions would familiarize participants with necessary equipment and protocols to ensure monitoring quality. Faculty and interdisciplinary university units would also be heavily involved in administration and evaluation. Educated and technically oriented seniors are an underutilized community resource. Nearly any community has a cadre of seniors capable of guiding students' monitoring efforts and willing to contribute time to community betterment.
Seniors represent a key link between youth monitors and university faculty.
Seniors would organize monitoring activities, provide monitoring instruction to youth, ensure that monitoring results are recorded and compiled, and serve in a quality-control capacity. The centerpiece of this concept is, of course, youth serving as environmental monitors. Their involvement will achieve the community's goals while contributing to environmental education. Efforts would be made to involve a significant number of young people, but goals of involving a large number of student participants should be secondary to the primary emphasis on the quality of both the learning experience and monitoring efforts. Examples abound of low-cost equipment that can be used for monitoring.