Northwood High Senior Pursues Passion For Environmental Advocacy

SILVER SPRING, MD — Maya Ducker, a senior at Northwood High School and resident of Silver Spring, was one of 10 students to receive a NSHSS Foundation Earth Day Scholarship from the National Society of High School Scholars Foundation.

The award recognizes students who through their work or projects seek to raise awareness of environmental concerns in order to the save the planet.

"At the environmental club at my school, in the beginning of the year, we started this composting project that we wanted to continue from a year prior but expand to more classrooms," Ducker told Patch.

Unfortunately, since Northwood was going to be renovated over the next couple of years, the club couldn't do a large-scale project.

"Instead, we decided to just do small, individual composting bins in five or six classrooms all scattered throughout the school and in the cafeteria," Ducker said.

For Earth Day, club members wanted to create a video about composting to inform other students about the school's composting program and to let them know that it was an active resource for them to use.

"We just tried to do a little video that played in the morning announcements for this entire week," Ducker said. "Just explaining, 'Here are the right ways to compost. Here are opportunities you have to compost,' and explaining what we've done as a club throughout this year."

Ducker first introduced the idea of starting a composting program at her school last year after her family participated in a local composting program. She and other like-minded students advocated for composting programs to be installed at all Montgomery County schools.

After gathering more than 5,000 signatures, the students were able to get a bill passed that allowed to apply for federal funding for their project. Based on Ducker's application, Leaders Across the World provided funding that helped pay for Northwood's mini-composting program and to allow the school to keep its GreenSchool certified status.

Last summer, Ducker traveled to Brazil with 15 other high school students as part of the U.S. State Department's Youth Ambassador program. The trip included a visit to the U.S. Embassy, where the students got to meet the charge d'affaires, who was in charge of the embassy while the ambassador was away.

"I really liked meeting all these people who were so passionate about international relations," Ducker said, who has an interest in studying international affairs in college.

The students also met with a national park officer and participated in a little environmental project, which made Ducker think about possibly pursuing a career that combined her two interests.

"Climate change is the biggest problem in the future," she said. "It scares me a lot and and makes me very nervous. I have always wanted to work on that. That's the biggest problem of my generation and of the next."

Ducker recently committed to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she plans to study international affairs with a second major in environmental studies.

"Being able to combine my two interests in college, where I can work on implementing more environmentally friendly policies in the future around the world, that would be my ideal future," she said.