AVE,also known as "Students Against Violating the Earth," is a remarkable student-run organization in the Souderton Area School District (Montgomery Co., PA). This isn't the first time they've been in the news: in 1997 they won the national Anheuser-Busch/Sea World Environmental Excellence Award for the environmentally responsible house they built adjacent to the school. Students worked with architects, the school board, planners and businesses to build their "Project Effect" house, which features carpeting made from recycled plastics, state-of-the-art energy-saving appliances, fixtures and devices, and a composting toilet. In 1999, when the school's expansion plans called for a stormwater run-off retention basin to be placed right next to the Project Effect house, the students and their resourceful faculty advisor Ken Hamilton got creative again. They suggested a re-design that resulted in a constructed emergent wetland system instead -- an on-site outdoor ecology laboratory that now serves thousands of students, the district's student-teacher/intern programs and community members. The wetland system also filters the "gray water" from sinks in the "Effect" house, an activity permitted under the house's special "experimental home" designation. This wetland laboratory was so enormously successful in its first year that erosion and sedimentation problems, soil compaction and vegetation stripping in the constructed wetland itself began to threaten the system. A Growing Greener grant helped the group restore the wetland system and develop three new access paths and sampling points to distribute the foot-traffic load and usage impacts. Other SAVE student activities on their 8-acre site include designing an irrigation system that will use an in-ground soil-moisture-monitor, which will send a signal to release stored rainwater to the gardens when soil moisture drops to a certain level, and developing public education videos and CD's, viewable on and off the Internet, under Growing Greener funding. Their vision for the videos and CD's: to make available to teachers and students around the world instantaneous and inexpensive "virtual field trips," for example, to a waste-water treatment facility, to ponds and streams to see comparisons and contrasts of pond and stream life, to study the impacts of point and non-point source pollution on each, and so on. Advice to others looking into these types of projects: identify and target specific needs in your community/poll your community (these students actually set up an "environmental hotline" to draw out people's concerns), build broad partnerships, work with your school districts, involve students and give them "ownership" of their projects, be accessible and communicate often and clearly, so people can understand and become supportive and involved.


For More Information:
Ken Hamilton, Souderton Area High School, 41 North School Lane; Souderton, PA 18964; email: khamilto@mciu.org; SAVE Hotline: 215/723-4989.

Also, visit the GreenWorks.tv Web site archives for their coverage of SAVE and the Project Effect House story.