New Roads students take first place in county-wide competition.
By Keldine Hull
A team of ten 7th graders from New Roads School are this year’s Streets to Seas champions for the third year in a row. Hosted by Los Angeles County Department of Public Works and sponsored by Generation Earth and Clean LA, competing teams were asked to design an education campaign that targets an environmental issue in their community, specifically as it relates to water usage and awareness.
After measuring water usage in toilets and water fountains around the New Roads campus, the participating team found that 187 gallons of water were used per day, most of which came from water fountain usage. The team determined that if more students utilized water bottles instead of continually drinking water from the fountains, more water would be preserved. After testing their theory, they concluded that 61 percent of water from fountains is wasted. According to New Roads School, the team created an awareness program to offer students an incentive in the form of candy to bring water bottles to school. On the first day of the campaign, 20 students drank from water bottles instead of water fountains. The team hopes that students will continue to bring water bottles to school without candy as their incentive.
Over 35 Los Angeles public, private, and charter schools competed in the annual event. Middle schools in Gardena, Inglewood, North Hollywood, and Long Beach were among the finalists. The two top place teams- grand prize middle school and high school winners- won a field trip to the Floating Laboratory in Long Beach. According to Andrea Carothers, a seventh-grade science teacher and faculty advisor, “The seventh graders worked extremely hard in this competition. They worked well as a team, listening to each other’s ideas as they designed an experiment. We couldn’t be more proud of them and excited for them.”
