The decision to install or remove a stream barrier can have many consequences. Water quality, habitat conductivity, and flood control issues can be degraded or improved by the presence or absence of stream barriers. The objective of this work was to bring students into this decision-making process by showing them how to measure water quality parameters before/after a stream barrier using wireless hand-held probes and to compare that field data to portions of streams with no barriers. Minisceongo Creek (West Haverstraw) and Furnace Brook (Croton-on-Hudson) were the target tributaries, located directly across from each other on the West and East Banks of the Hudson River. Furnace Brook has several stream barriers just upstream of a fyke net for determining American eel counts. Local middle school students and teachers (155) were trained in how to use water quality probes and then they participated in a virtual field trip and lessons learned workshop in June 2020. Six water quality datasets measuring water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, depth, barometric pressure and nitrate were collected in 2020: Spring data sets (2 tributaries, above/below stream barriers) and Fall 2020 (above/below 2 barriers in Furnace Brook only, nitrate probe, no eel data). Preliminary analysis of the 2020 data has shown that nitrate (mV) levels are lower on the downstream side of the stream barriers, and dissolved oxygen (mg/L) levels are higher below the stream barriers. Additional analyses of these datasets are ongoing, along with correlating eel data with water quality from previous years.