New Roads Middle School Team Wins 'Streets To Seas' Competition

SANTA MONICA, CA — New Roads School's middle school students were named Streets to the Seas champions for the third year in a row. The team, which was made of 10 seventh graders, came up with an innovative way to study water usage on campus and created an incentive program to help reduce water waste, the New Roads School press release said.

The competition was sponsored by Generation Earth and Clean LA and was put on by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. It included more than 35 public, private, and charter schools from across Los Angeles County. Schools were asked to design an education campaign that addresses an environmental problem in their community in regard to water usage and awareness.

New Roads students teamed up with the on-campus facilities staff to identify the problem of water usage; they measured water usage in toilets and water fountains around campus and found that New Roads campus used about 187 gallons of water per day, and most of the water waste was caused by water fountains.

The team came up with a hypothesis: "If all students used [reusable] water bottles instead of drinking straight from the water fountains, the system would be much more efficient." To test their hypothesis, they covered a fountain’s drain with a stopper and three students drank from the fountain for 10 seconds. They measured the water that was left behind, and divided its volume by the fountain’s water flow rate to conclude that 61 percent of water from water fountains is wasted, the press release said.

The team created — and pilot tested — an awareness campaign which encouraged students to start bringing water bottles to school with an incentive (candy) for filling their bottles, the press release said. On the first day, 22 students used water bottles.

The team’s goal is to stop offering candy once the students form a habit of using water bottles, the press release said.

"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," said seventh grade science teacher and faculty advisor Andrea Carothers.

Ten schools were selected for a final round of judging at Disney Synergy Lab. The two winning teams — one high school and one middle school — won a trip to the Floating Laboratory in Long Beach, the press release said.