Three local students have won at the provincial Caring For Our Watershed Competition and their project is attracting the attention of Lloydminster city council.
Some 275 projects were submitted from 50 schools in Alberta and the adjudicators dropped the hammer on Bishop Lloyd Elementary School as the winner.
As part of Bishop Lloyd’s grade 8 land-based cultural leadership program, students deep dived the local watershed and had to design a project to improve their watershed.
The trio of Kaitlyn Rak, Libby Sherbinin and Linkin Jaycox are stoked about their award winning submission as they look for local applications. The students spoke to city representatives at the Share Your Voice forum and while they await a formal invite to council they are sharing rainwater management ideas for the proposed Lloydminster Place events centre.
Libby Sherbinin explains the scope of the project goes beyond collecting the rainwater from the roof.
“We would also like to use some different ideas on how to filter it and return it in a better way to the environment, like slow the flow down, make sure all the toxins come out so that it’s better for the environment when it goes back.”
Linkin Jaycox says they had to come up with an idea to improve the watershed which is the area of land that all the rivers drain into. She says healthier watersheds save the environment and the winner of the contest gets to implement their idea.
“We did rainwater. It’s just like stormwater that comes off in storms. And we want to make sure that it goes into a better place and it’s better taken care of. We have put a bunch of different ideas that would generally help that, like plants, rain barrels and all that stuff.”
For homeowners, the youngsters shared some practical applications that include using certain porous building materials like sand and gravel around a home, and as well plants to filter water. Kaitlyn Rak had some ideas for a few useful filtering plants.
“Saskatoon berries, dogwood, some varieties of junipers in addition to rain barrels and a garden.”
The students will be looking for more ways to incorporate their ideas locally to support watershed management.