In honor of Illinois Earth Month this April, the elementary and middle school students of the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 will learn about and practice conserving energy by participating in the district’s first Eco Power Challenge.
The challenge, created by the District’s Greening/Sustainability committee and supported by Exelon Corporation and Northwestern students, aims to show young students how big of an impact they can make on the environment by conserving electricity at school.
Conservation awareness began April 1 with the first of 29 daily electricity meter readings at 13 schools, according to District Director of Communications Pat Markham. At the end of the month, the energy consumption totals will be compared with totals from 2010.
Representatives from Exelon Corporation will visit the middle schools next week to present the importance of electricity conservation efforts and show PSAs to the students. Meanwhile, environmentally savvy student volunteers from NU will serve as the core presenters at the elementary schools, according to District Board member Neal Levin.
“The key factor in this challenge is student awareness and student involvement and being hands-on,” he said.
This is one of the board’s largest District-wide sustainability initiatives, though some individual schools have their own projects such as school farms, Levin said.
Levin, a member of the Greening/Sustainability committee started in 2007, helped rewrite the committee’s mission statement to focus more on District-wide initiatives. Modeling the project after the Green Cup challenge, he wanted to find the best way to combine conservation and student engagement.
Levin, whose daughter is in first grade, said conservation and protecting the environment is something even the youngest can pick up on.
McCormick junior Michael Giannetto, an environmental engineering major and co-chair of Students for Ecological and Environmental Development, is one of the NU students asked to lead the presentations for young children.
“We would love to work with them,” Giannetto said. “It will be a challenge, making a presentation that doesn’t go into too much detail and getting across the importance of energy conservation.”
For the elementary students, Levin said the committee wants to focus mostly on energy conservation on a grand, easily understandable scale. The presentations for older students will include some of the science and technology behind energy generation and what people of the world are doing relative to conservation.
“We want students to run the show by providing a number of tools for the kids to participate – from group presentations to flyers to reading the electricity meters themselves every day, ” Levin said. “The schools are all behind it and understand its importance.”
