Students Engage in a Mind-Numbing Array of Activities to Green Their School, Win Cash in the Process!
by Kenny Luna, North Babylon, NY on 11.20.07
Recently, DoSomething.org and KeySpan Energy teamed up for their Environmental Sustainability Competition with the goal of encouraging young people to demonstrate leadership in environmental action. And it turns out the first place winning entry comes from the members of Boston Latin School’s Youth Climate Action Network, who put together an award winning effort that made a difference in their own community.
Recognizing that there is no one solution, they approached the problem from a number of different angles... Engaging themselves in a wide range of activities like working to set up a student run recycling program in their cafeteria, creating a series of 7 original public service announcements to create public awareness of the issue of climate change, creating a paper recycling program in their school, running a campaign to reduce energy usage throughout the school day, and hosting a grand total of 45 presentations to educate their peers about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle.
But that’s not all…
Because they also led a student-organized fundraising effort for solar panels at their school, and successfully signed up 270 of their peers to the “Think Outside the Bottle” pledge, indicating that from now on they’d be drinking tap water from reusable bottles while foregoing the ubiquitous plastic Poland Spring bottle found in high schools across the country.
Of course, with people across the country convinced en masse that water that comes in a bottle is somehow healthier than the liquid that spurts from the local tap there’s a huge opportunity for these students to help grow the concept…
And to be honest, they did way more than even I could list above, but if you head over to their site on DoSomething.org you can get an even better handle on some of the amazing stuff they put together.
So congrats to the students at Boston Latin, they’re a great example of high school students stepping up and making a difference in a big way to help stop global warming, and earning a deserved $1000 prize to further their efforts in the process…
Via:: Press Release
Well they did this for a month from the first of Oct to the 30th of oct.
How many of these people will take what they have learned and do it daily to make the future our parents Hoped we would make for our selves?
Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at on what they conserved. They cut their schools light bill by a good deal. This saves the tax dollars so why not do it right now and for life. Every school in the country could be designated as to when to have their PC shut off MS only patches once a month now it is not nessarary to have a pc on overnight to update anymore.
What they have done is taken the first step on the right path hopefully other steps will follow.
D~W
love this! already tweeted it too....i love their "outside the bottle" idea....thoughts on how to grow it?