by Sara Mahjoub, ACE Field Correspondent and student at Lycee Internationale de Los Angeles (LILA)

We knew by being our school’s first Green team, it was our job to make our classmates aware of climate education and how we, students can help. As ACE’s motto says: “Educate. Inspire. Activate.” We did just that.

A few weeks ago our Green team at school decided to organize a whole week dedicated to thinking, acting, and living green. Our team is comprised of five students in 11th grade and we were responsible for coming up with our own day that reinforced a way to be a more earth-friendly school. Our school that has a very small student population of about 200 students from 6-12th grade who were never informed on how to be more ‘green’ by doing simple things.

With the awesome support from our school’s administration and the eager students at our school, we were able to throw the 1st Green week! Fortunately, this week went amazing and our goal to make our school more aware of the earth’s issues and how we can help as individuals was successful.

We wanted to think of days that were possible and did not ask too much from the students at our school in order to have their 100% cooperation.

Our first activity was Power Down Day, which was the day I organized. During Power Down Day, all the lights in the classrooms would be turned off for the day and we planned to use sunlight from the windows instead. At first it was difficult to convince my teachers to leave the lights off, largely because that day the sunlight was inefficient, but it was our goal to keep our promise and achieve our message.

One amazing memory I have of this day is the 8^th grade class (who actually won the prize for earth week participation in the middle school) that turned down the offer of watching a movie in class just to save energy. They also kept their projector switched off.

Tuesday was Walk and Roll Day which went very smoothly and surprisingly MANY students carpooled! Students were asked to either carpool, walk, take a bike, etc. We did this day because if students do this it will help reduce pollution in the air and traffic at the school. This is one step to a healthier life. Although it was pretty chaotic checking all the students that just happen to all arrive two minutes before school started, the results were very satisfying.

Wednesday, we asked students to bring reusable water bottles instead of plastic ones and this was to lower the amount of plastic consumed and to encourage our classmates to re-use their bottle.

Lastly, Thursday was Burger Break Day. Thursday was a day where the high school students focused on avoiding beef. We did this to raise awareness of alternate ways of being eco-friendly, and the great deal of pollution that comes from cows and other grazing animals. The world’s 1.5 billion cows and billions of other grazing animals emit dozens of polluting gases, including a fifth of atmospheric methane and two-thirds of all ammonia comes from cows.

To conclude our week, we did a battery drive to add to our recycling drive that we do throughout the year. We installed recycling bins for just cans and bottles throughout the school and students have really used them well so far. It was a joy for the Green team to have seen the students our school so invested in our project and we knew that the winning class had to win a prize. We promised the winners an exclusive “Green Goodie bag” filled with assorted ‘earth-friendly” things. It was quite funny seeing the smaller grades so excited to know who the winners were and being asked everyday in the bus if it was them who had won. I really encourage my fellow ACE members around the United States to take on this challenge because it really motivates and teaches individuals in a fun way!