Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series examining a Kenai Watershed Forum study showing violations of state water quality standards on the Kenai River. Sunday’s story will examine community response and a potential impairment designation for the river.

Boat traffic is stirring up enough sediment on the Kenai River to cause violations of state standards for drinking water, recreational use and the health of fish and wildlife, according to a study.

Nearly 36 percent of students in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District are classified as overweight or obese last year according to an Alaska Department of Health and Social Services study.

The study examined body mass index data for the student body over a two-year period and found that the bulk of students, 63 percent, were within a healthy weight range.

KPBSD joined two other school districts in Alaska who participated in studies with the DHSS.

Vampire bats don’t live in Alaska. They don’t drink human blood and they don’t usually kill the livestock they’re feeding on.

Still, if Kaden Quimby saw a bat, he thinks he’d probably hit it with a shovel. Just in case.

Quimby’s class, along with several others at Mountain View Elementary learned basic bat and owl facts Monday as part of a program through the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

Kellie Davidson’s class was the first to see the bat presentation and the 7- and 8-year-old students were surprisingly knowledgeable about the mammals.

While the 2012 commercial sockeye salmon fishing harvest was the ninth highest in the past 20 years, settnetters in the Upper Subdistrict experienced their lowest harvest since 1966 according to an Alaska Department of Fish and Game preliminary commercial season wrap-up.

By contrast, driftnetters harvested approximately 2.9 million sockeye, or about 93 percent of the total sockeye salmon harvest in the Upper Cook Inlet.

The total harvest of sockeye in the Upper Cook Inlet was 3.1 million fish according to the report.