Students win science award
Group plans to donate some prize money to help Camp Fire victims
A group of ambitious sixthgraders won the top prize for a nationwide project and they’re sharing some of the award money with the American Red Cross to help Camp Fire victims.
Nine students in Debbie Jones’ Arboga Elementary School class entered the Lexus ECO Challenge, which required them to create an action plan for the Land & Water and/or Air and Climate challenge and won $10,000 and a chance to win $30,000.
“When we learned that we won, we had just gotten back from Thanksgiving break,” said Mary Banach, 11, one of the participating students. “She (Jones) had me read it out loud to everyone in the office and the moment in the letter when it said ‘congratulations’ we were all celebrating, high-fiving and hugging – it was the happiest moment of my life in school.”
Banach said the students, who called themselves the Arboga Wild Fighters, spent every lunch break at school working on the project – which focused on the environmental impacts of wildfires – for more than two months and finished it up about three days before the due date.
“One of the things we achieved as a group was working through the little fights but
we all got closer and became better friends,” she said. “Never stop trying, even when things get hard because things will get better.”
Debbie Jones, who has been teaching for nine years, said she hand-picked the students for the project but all of the 68 students in her two language arts classes helped support the nine who were leading the challenge.
“It was amazing because the ones who didn’t participate in the project – my whole class helped them with research and other support,” she said. “They realized that you have to work hard to get something out of life.”
Jones said fire became the focus of the project because she knows how many people spend time in the outdoors and that much of the talk about the environment can be confusing.
“We submitted the project and ten days later, the Camp Fire happened,” Jones said. “We know our environment is important to everyone and the truth is, we don’t know exactly what’s really going on because it’s so political.”
As part of the award, she said each of the nine students got $798, she got $1,000 and the school got $2,000.
“They all get a check from Lexus,” Jones said. “All nine put in $50 each to split among the entire class and some are giving money to the animal shelters in Chico to help with the people impacted by the Camp Fire.”
Lucy Merrill, 11, said she learned a lot working on the project and made some good connections with classmates.
“I leaned how important our environment is and how much fire impacts our environment,” she said. “I learned that working with people you don’t really hang out with can help you grow overall.”
As part of the project, they organized school assemblies to inform students about the dangers of wildfires and how to prevent them, brought in firefighters to explain the effects of deforestation, distributed flyers with information on how to avoid backyard burning in windy conditions and other precautions; and put a group together to pick up items in public areas that could start a fire and to encourage others to do the same.
For more information on the project, visit bit.ly/2ulgsku.