December 15, 2019 7th and 8th graders at Greenwood Academy participated in an energy savings contest where we attempted to reduce the amount of energy usage in our school. The goal of the Re:New Our Schools contest was to save as much energy as we could while gaining points through activities we completed. In order to win the contest, we needed the most earned points out of all the schools that were competing. When our school Marie L. Greenwood Academy won this contest, we received $2,500 for our school.
We presented to administration and created slides about the competition including what we would do to earn points and save energy. We also incorporated what the school could do to help us reach our goal of winning the competition by reducing energy use. In the final presentation, we added that we would like to continue saving energy in the school and the ways we could do that.
We gave presentations on saving energy to all the classes in both English and Spanish and shared weekly announcements about the competition to keep the whole school motivated.
Another part of the Creative Campaign was incorporating 5th grade. The 5th graders helped us make posters to help spread the word. When creating the posters they made sure to make them in Spanish and English. Our class decided which ones were the best and made them into bigger versions and hung them up.
We learned a lot in the past few weeks and it helped open our eyes to a new way of living. We learned our school has solar panels to reduce our electrical draw from the grid and we even push electricity back into the grid on sunny weekends. We learned that saving energy is very important and can save our world. Saving energy helps the environment, money, and can be beneficial in our life. We also learned about 24% of Denver’s electricity is produce using wind or solar power. Lastly, we learned that energy usage is a big problem in our world and needs to be fixed. This experience has taught us many lessons about the environment that we are all very grateful for.
There were many challenges and successes we faced during the last few weeks. Some challenges we faced were creating lesson plans and getting them done on time for the presentations. Staying organized, keeping it professional, and incorporating all teachers and grade levels into helping us reduce the energy consumption in our school turned out to be quite difficult as well.
Some successes we had were making posters and reminders to hang up around the school. Doing the announcements once or twice a week just to keep the school updated on our actions and energy savings was another success. One of our biggest successes was also working as a team to help get everything done on time and on schedule, and presenting the lesson plans to each classroom. Overall, we can gladly say as a team that this whole competition was a success.
We are planning to spend our award money by looking into getting light sensors that help classrooms conserve energy, smart power strips, and to go on field trips. For our field trips we wanted to take a look at Xcel Energy and the Power Plant Tour. We’d also like to incorporate the money that we won into something compost related. We want to help our school by turning all the garbage that we produce during lunch into compost, so that we can have fertile soil to help our garden.
