Boy Scout builds weather station
RIDGEFIELD — Scotland Elementary School is one of Ajay Natarajan’s favorite places, so he didn’t hesitate to come up with ideas to improve the school as part of his requirements to earn the rank of Eagle Scout for the Ridgefield Boy Scout Troop 76.
“I was initially going to clean the courtyard outside near the kindergarten playground but the courtyard got cleaned up before I got the chance,” he said during a presentation after school last week with a group of Scotland teachers, some of whom taught him as a young elementary school student several years earlier.
Natarajan ultimately built a weather station for Scotland students this summer, in an effort to complete a project to benefit the community.
“I love the weather,” he told the teachers.
“There’s a thermometer, a barometer, and a hydrometer inside,” he said. “You can use it to introduce weather to students. Concepts like rain, snow, and predicting the temperature.”
Maybe graphing and trends for older students, Natarajan suggested.
“I just want to foster a love for weather,” he said.
Natarajan described the weather station as a “a white box birdhouse” to the teachers and said there were sheets of information inside that would explain some of the basic concepts — like high pressure systems, relative humidity, and dew point.
“We just want to know when it’ll snow,” one teacher joked.
“Probably in the winter,” Natarajan said.
Before taking pictures with his former teachers in front of the “birdhouse,” the Boy Scout thanked all the people who helped him with the project.
“My favorite part of this was the leadership aspect,” he said. “I helped lead my brother and sister and my fellow scouts.
“We dug a hole, built the station, put it in the ground and filled the hole. I couldn’t have done it without them.”