KANE'OHE — High school and elementary students can now get scholarships to study the environment at a special summer seminar at Windward Community College.

Administrators hope the experience will raise student interest in science, research and teaching.

The Pacific Center for Environmental Studies, or PaCES, and Bay Watershed Education and Training, or B-WET, have partnered to create a five-week summer enrichment program for 28 students.

Manning Taite, of the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology, said he worked with David Krupp, biology and environmental professor at Windward Community College, to combine their programs and blend the goals of PaCES and B-WET to give students an opportunity to explore sciences at a higher level.

"This gives them a real-life experience of being a scientist or researcher," Taite said at a midterm luncheon where students demonstrated some of their projects. "It's essentially an 8-to-5 job, and during that time it's intense training. So they are playing the roles of a researcher."

Krupp, coordinator for PaCES, said originally the two programs created separate, similar programs. Both took the ahupua'a, or ridge to reef, view of humans' interaction with the environment and their effect on it, Krupp said.

"We realized that by combining resources we could give the kids a much broader set of experiences and do more," Krupp said.

The high school students get a $500 scholarship. The money is offered as an incentive to draw students away from summer jobs, Krupp said. This is the summer environmental program's second year of operation.

So far the students have attended lectures, learned first aid, familiarized themselves with lab equipment and data collection, collected samples and analyzed them. The students have been to Coconut Island, visited streams, toured a plant restoration project in Kawai Nui Marsh and surveyed coral. They'll do more and develop a project for which they'll write a paper and present it.

At the luncheon demonstration attended by PaCES board members and environmental industry representatives, the students talked about a project to replicate and identify the DNA of bacteria found on coral. Last year's students found a brand-new bacterium, said Robert Hutchison, B-WET coordinator and teacher at Le Jardin Academy.

The course also covers environmental awareness and protection, Hutchison said.

"We're really trying to drive home Native Hawaiian stewardship of the land as well as the modern science and the responsibility," he said, adding that the program will track the students to see if they maintain an interest in the sciences.

Students said the course has been varied and fun. They also like the money for going to school and that they'll earn four college credits. They said their minds are more open to studying the sciences. Deanna Mutch, a Castle High School student, said the course has increased her interest in medicine.

"I want to go into medicine, so learning about the DNA and bacteria and how things work, that really keeps me interested," Mutch said.

Sean Gershaneck, a senior at Le Jardin and mentor in the program, said he learned more about the environment, Kane'ohe Bay and Coconut Island than he learned in high school. The course helped him decide to study botany and native Hawaiian plants, Gershaneck said. The program is especially needed for his generation, he said.

"We have to help clean up the bay, the parks and recover the damage that was done over the past years because at the rate that our native species are going, at the rate forests are disappearing throughout the Hawaiian Islands our native species may not exist any more for our children and future generations," Gershaneck said.

PaCES is funded by a $225,000 grant from the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation and B-WET. It also receives funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Terrence George, executive director for the Castle Foundation, said the program fits well with the foundation's focus of marine near-shore conservation. The summer program gives students the opportunity to get intensive training from some of Hawai'i's top marine biologists, George said.

"We think communities are the key to respecting what we have, key to protecting what we have and teaching the next generation how to be good stewards," he said.

This year the program was given $7,500 by John and Sue Dean to pay a Waimanalo Elementary and Intermediate School teacher to participate in the program, along with four sixth-grade students, who received a $300 stipend for attending the course. Their teacher received $4,700.

Reach Eloise Aguiar at eaguiar@honoluluadvertiser.com.