The Problem
After watching "Racing Extinction" a group of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students started a grass-roots campaign last year with a vision to "dream big" by "starting small." Students started by photographing their beginning process and the frogs, using Joel Satrore's techniques as guidance and inspiration. Students identified a section of school campus where frogs had naturally laid eggs but where it had become heavily polluted and, what was worse, the pollution was running off into the Cheaspeake Bay watershed. Once the frogs hatched, some students were harming the frogs further. This concerned group of students formed the "Green Club," with the goal to clean up the school campus, create a pollinator garden, and to clean up the frog area and educate others about habitat extinction, starting at home. Using this grant money, students would like to clean up this identified area first, as it feeds into the Chesapeake Bay watershed. They would like to work with science 6 classes, educating all incoming students about why this particular habitat is important to our real-world. They would like to network with local experts and plant indigenous flora and attract fauna to the area and increase awareness to the community to promote better behaviors for the future with their peers. Finally, they would like to move on to other areas of our campus and create other areas of activism, such as pollinator gardens. The grand vision is to work towards a larger, county-wide, state, then national student-led form of activism, where school habitats serve as real-world examples of working in tandem of classroom learning modules, thereby helping students to learn that they, indeed, are the change-agents of the world.
