This is is a guest post by Field Correspondent Catherine Farmer, sophomore at East Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina.

When Student Government announced that they were doing a Homecoming banner contest here at East, we at Environmental Club immediately started planning.  The parameters for the contest were pretty simple: it had to be the length of one section of fence, it had to somehow incorporate the Homecoming theme, and it had to relate to the club designing the banner. It was pretty easy to relate the theme (Wild Nights and Bright Lights) back to environmental sustainability – we ended up having way too many ideas for just one banner!

After much deliberation, we finally decided on the slogan “Save Wildlife, Use Efficient Lights” for our banner, because we thought it related both to the theme and to what our club is trying to do: educate the staff and students here on how to be more eco-friendly. We met one day before school and made the poster, and it ended up looking pretty amazing. We procured a giant piece of paper from our school library, painted a skyline complete with buildings and stars for the background, used recycled paper to cut out the letters in the slogan, and used a piece of scrap paper to paint our school mascot, the wildcat, to place in the center of the banner.

My favorite part of the banner was the “lightbulb” garland we had hanging over the top: We found empty energy drink bottles in our school’s recycling bins, spray-painted the bottoms silver, and painted the tops white. The finishing touch was a permanent marker spiral, to make them look like compact fluorescent bulbs – they looked really cool, and we got a lot of compliments for our creative recycling.When the contest results came out, we found out that we didn’t place, but we did receive an Honorable Mention. While we were a little disappointed – we may be biased, but we all thought that our poster was awesome – we weren’t too sad. While it would have been great to win, spreading the word about being environmentally friendly was more important to us. Through the poster, we were able to teach both adults and students that even a small thing, such as changing the type of lightbulbs you use, can make a pretty big difference. In the long run, we accomplished what we wanted to do, and had a lot of fun while doing it.