Newberry students receive first place national win for water project

Team members included Alex Black, Naomi Daniels, Shelby Deen, Kristi Duncan, Madison Karelas, Tiffany O’Connell, Katie Pabst, Courtney Ray, Cody Thomas, Brian Skipper

 A team of students at Newberry High School has won its third top environmental award this school year with a project aimed at preserving water locally and providing clean water internationally.

The school’s PANTHER team (Providing A New Way To Help Environmental Restoration) was one of four high school teams across the nation to win a first-place award in the final category of the 2010 Lexus Environmental Challenge Contest, a national competition sponsored by Toyota and Scholastic. With that win, the team has now won first-place awards in all three challenges of the year-long competition, the only school nationally to earn such a sweep.

Newberry High's final challenge team included seniors Alex Black, Naomi Daniels, Shelby Deen, Kristi Duncan, Madison Karelas, Tiffany O’Connell, Katie Pabst, Courtney Ray, Cody Thomas and Brian Skipper. All of the students had worked on previous award-winning projects.

“I am so proud of the work these students have done,” said Newberry High science teacher and club sponsor Cynthia Holland. “They have made a significant environmental impact on Newberry and Alachua County.”

“We learned that the youth in society need to raise the awareness of environmental problems,” said Ray. “We can make a difference.”

For their final environmental challenge, the team’s mission was to educate the public on the loss of wetlands and other aquatic habitats and to promote water conservation. To meet that mission, the students developed and implemented learning activities for younger children in their community, created public service announcements and used other media to encourage people to conserve water.

Holland says the projects give the students the opportunity to develop more than environmental awareness.

“The students have learned valuable communication, writing and technology skills,” she said. “They developed presentations, made videos and public service announcements, created web pages, even wrote lessons and designed activity books.” 

“‘There is no I in team’ is a very true statement,” said Duncan. “We learned to work together and learned how important it was to be dependable.”

One of the group’s most ambitious activities was the Gallons of Love Walk for Haiti, a fundraiser that brought in nearly $1,000 for the Children’s Safe Drinking Water Foundation. That money will be used to purchase water purification packets to provide clean water for the children of Haiti.

The school’s previous award-winning projects were focused on planting trees within the city of Newberry and saving energy and recycling during the holiday season.

All told, the Newberry PANTHER teams have won $35,000 in prize money throughout the year. The school received $7,000, Holland received $4,000 and the students involved in the three projects split $24,000 in scholarship money. 

But team members say the benefits of working on the project go beyond the cash awards.

It was a lot of fun,” said Skipper. “It’s not about the money and winning, but that people listened to us!”