The newly founded club at Stamford High School, the Environmental Action Committee (EAC), was established last year by Brandon Hoak (disclosure: he also happens to be my older brother). The sole purpose of this club was to make SHS and Stamford itself more environmentally friendly places. For the EAC’s first project, they felt as if fundraising for more advanced water fountains would be a great step towards making SHS more environmentally conscious.

According to Hoak, the idea behind the water fountains stemmed from rumors that the water coming out of the fountains in the school was not the cleanest. This would be fixed, since the new water fountains have better filtration systems which would produce cleaner water regardless of whether the rumors were valid in the first place. The other reason for the fundraising of the water fountains was to promote students’ use of reusable water bottles and reduce the amount of plastic students use. This was ideal since the new fountains have a spot for someone to directly drink from and another spot that is dedicated to just refilling a bottle, which is activated by a motion sensor. This allows the water bottle to stand straight up when being refilled rather than having to be put at any angle to be aligned with the spout.

The EAC also thought it was suitable to sell reusable water bottles, since the money would be going towards water fountains. The EAC sold custom orange Nalgene water bottles with the SHS crest on one side and the saying “black knights go green” on the other side. The current Co-President of the EAC, Joan Perez, discussed what this project means to her.

“Throughout my years at Stamford High, I have heard so many people say how they can’t drink from the water fountains because they don’t trust the water that flows through it. This is why they bring plastic water bottles from home with the inability to recycle them later on. However, with the installation of these new water fountains, we will be encouraging the disuse of plastic water bottles that don’t get recycled half the time, and encourage students to be more environmentally friendly,” said Perez.  

Be on the lookout for these water fountains, which have already been purchased and are just waiting to be installed.