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It's So Easy Being Green / Sunset students hoping all will think globally, act locally
By Mitch ShawSUNSET -- A thick cloud of smog lingered in the air as six Sunset Junior High students and their teacher set out on a mission to turn the world green.
"Wow, it's really bad today," said Sunset teacher Linda Stalter from her seat on the top level of the FrontRunner commuter rail. "This looks worse than the air did when I lived in Southern California."
The students are all founding members of the Green Club. The after-school program at the school was formed this year with the sole purpose of making the students of Sunset more environmentally sensitive.
"A lot of kids don't even recycle," said Andrew Tibbets, a seventh-grader at the school. "But it's just as easy to put something in the recycling bin as it is to put it in the trash can."
The club, which is made up of Tibbets, Victoria Watters, Joshua Watters, Bailie Yannes, Sydney Laehr and Alexis Cady, and directed by Stalter, is competing as Team Breathe Green in the Lexus Eco Challenge. The national contest, sponsored by Lexus and Scholastic, encourages secondary school students to develop and implement environmental programs that positively impact their communities.
After studying the local environment, students participating in the contest develop an action plan that they feel will best benefit their local community.
Winning teams receive thousands of dollars in grants and scholarships.
Team Breathe Green chose to focus on a clean air campaign.
"We thought we would focus on helping the air quality by utilizing mass transit," said Stalter. "With FrontRunner available now, it just makes a lot of sense."
Yannes, a seventh-grader at Sunset had a more urgent explanation of the group's motivation.
"Our Earth is falling to the ground and we are all going to die," said Yannes.
"But we don't have to take the Earth with us," Stalter quickly replied.
Outfitted in green T-shirts with "Team Breathe Green" emblazoned across the front, the students took FrontRunner from Clearfield to the Clark Planetarium at the Gateway in Salt Lake City recently. They documented their trip with photos and notes to present to the entire school during an upcoming assembly.
"We took a survey of how many students used mass transit and we will take another one a few weeks after our presentation to see if we encouraged anybody," Stalter said.
The team has already achieved one major milestone since it began just a few months ago.
Thanks to their urging, Sunset Junior High now recycles all of its paper.
Stalter is so dedicated to an exemplary environmentally sensitive lifestyle, she even purchased a bright green Toyota Prius hybrid electric car this summer.
"We just felt like there was a strong need for young people to start really being aware of what we need to do to take care of the Earth," Stalter said. "They are the ones who are going to be inheriting it."
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I am a member of the green club and yes Cydeny Lehr did get her name spelled wrong
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