On Wednesday April 16 the Environmental Club, Green Eyez, will accepted the Youth Sustainability award from the City of St. Paul. Mayor Chris Coleman will present the plaque at City Hall.

The club has achieved a LOT in a short amount of time including

*Grant funding for power strips to install in classrooms in order to "kill the phantom charge." Thank you to Como Northtown Community Credit Union for providing the grant! And Thank you to Menards for selling the power strips at cost! Many electronics "suck" energy while plugged in, even when turned off. The only way to stop this phantom charge is to unplug the item (laborious as a daily practice with multiple electronics) or to use a power strip and effectively unplug multiple electronics just by flicking a switch. We measured the electric draw of various electronics in the room while turned off. - TV's were 3 watts, computers were 12 watts. Many home electronics have a much higher draw (especially plasma t.v.'s can have over 100 watt draw, even turned off). We estimate the power strips will save the school about $2000 per year in energy costs and about 1500 pounds CO2.

*100% post consumer waste paper for our copy machines. Up until the present we have only used "virgin" paper in our classrooms. This means that trees were chopped down for the paper we use. with post-consumer waste paper, our paper comes from recycling bins. There were many bureaucratic hoops to jump through on this - many people think that recycled paper will jam the copy machine. That simply isn't true anymore. A spokesperson from Eureka visited our school and provided recycled paper samples that were indistinguishable from our virgin paper samples. They have run over one million copies in over 60 large, industrial copy machines in the metro area without any complaints. A Special thank you to Dan Mesick and Darlene Schmidt for their support on this project. Also students coordinated with the shop teacher to get a secure area to store the recycled paper. Special thanks to Bob Prifrel

*Coordinating Energy Wars - a district-wide initiative to reduce energy consumption from January to March

*Coordinating Focus the Nation - a school-wide 3-hour teach in on Global Warming

*Coordinating a conversation with Will Steger, a globally famous arctic explorer, regarding global warming and what can be done

*Coordinating Minnesota YEA (Youth Environmental Activists) meeting - a metro-wide meeting of environmental groups from public and private high schools, both urban and suburban. Many speakers were present and students networked and shared resources to accomplish environmental-based projects.

There are many students involved but the primary students involved include

Larissa Sage,  Dan Worku,  Jennie Duchschere,   Roz Anderson,   Audrey Smebakken,  Lars Johnson,  Luke Dauner,  Amelia Kahn,  Mary Scott and Sarah Brant

Primary adults include

Kathy Kahn (bio teacher at Como)

Sue Roegge (parent of a Como student)

Josh Leonard (science teacher at Como)