By SOPHIA RIVERA
Starting in September of 2024, a survey was held and highlighted a significant educational gap among elementary students, revealing that many are unaware of what air pollution is, while including the causes and effects. Despite the growing emphasis on this environmental issue, these young learners are struggling to identify harmful substances in their air. They even struggle to understand their origins and the species being affected. This issue, found by four intelligent highschool girls, are now educating the next generation with the knowledge to address and mitigate air pollution.
Air pollution is when our air gets damaged by substances called pollutants. Some of these pollutants could be gases from cars and vehicles, smog from factories, forest fires, and pesticides. When a vast amount of these pollutants are in our environment, it causes many species, including humans to have some sort of damage to their daily lives.
Within Washingtonville High School, a group of seniors have decided to take upon a challenge and decided to spread awareness of this issue. Starting in their Public Affairs class, they came up with this idea for their project. Ms. Bierling Powers, teacher of Global History I Enriched and SUPA Public Affairs explained, “this course is where students learn and create a public policy of their choice. The policy work, combined with class work, teaches students in SUPA PST about why we pursue policies, how the government and nonprofits are related to the creation of policy and how to interact with players and stakeholders.” While this class may have a fair amount of work, the final outcome makes the class worth it.
On Tuesday January 28th, this group nearly completed their public policy. They joined a third grade classroom at Taft Elementary and taught a lesson on air pollution. This group of seniors started with a short slideshow explaining what their project was and ended with the students painting bat houses that will soon be put up with around the district. The main focus of this project was to educate young students on ways to help maintain safe environments for not just themselves but animal species around them. The group decided on building and painting bat houses because bat species decrease a great amount when air pollution increases. When bats have a safe shelter, they can go into these houses built for them.
Now while the project started in just one classroom, the girls stated that they hope to further expand this project in the future. With this lesson, Two of the seniors in this group, Anna Buchanan and Eden Marriott expressed that they hope to make an educational connection with elementary students, while also allowing them to have fun painting bat houses.
The students divided up into small groups and a few vocalized with bright faces that their favorite part was being able to paint it in their own ways. They then understood that darker colors will attract the sunlight so they decorated their houses with dark blues, red, purples and brown. As the presentation concluded, these third graders left their classroom at the end of the day with huge smiles on their faces, knowledge on why air pollution is important to understand and ways to protect their environment.
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