Going Everywhere with CAS!: My Project

Creek Camp Scholarship Fund

Creative, Action, Service, a.k.a CAS is not just a community service class. It's an opportunity for students to explore their passion and help their community. My project for this year is to start a scholarship fund for students of La Paz to attend Creek Camp, an environmental science camp in Pennsylvanian, USA.

Creek Camps is a week long camp located in Allegheny College in Pennsylvanian. The camps is small, no more than 15 students per session from 9th-10th grade; to create a comfortable and familiar environment among the campers. During the time at the camp the campers will do a small research comparing down stream and up stream of French Creek located in Meadville. Along with the research the campers will be able to meet local professional and staff of Allegheny College that will share with them them additional information sharing the importance of water qualities for living organisms.

My goal is to send at least one student, hopefully 2 students to the session of the first week of July. I need to raise about $1,500 dollars to send one student to the camp. The plane tickets cost about $700 (the cheapest ones) dollars and the camps cost $600 dollars. I'm fundraising the money 3 different ways. The first way are the "La Paz Family Dinners" where the parents of La Paz are encouraged to got to a certain La Paz parent owned restaurant. Then that day the restaurant will be giving the scholarship fund a certain percentage of their proceed or from the consumption of the La Paz members. My second way of fundraising is a raffle of raffling an Ipad mini 16GB. I will have tickets to be sold a different locations and each ticket will be $4 or 2,000 colones and the winner will be draw at the La Paz wellness night on March 20th. And lastly my third way of fundraising is still in process of organization and planning but I want to do something big to get a lot money for the project and it will also be a good way for me to finish off CAS.

But why do I want to send a students to this camp?

Last year Selene and I had the unique experience of traveling to Meadville, Pennsylvania, on a Scholarship from Creek Connections. We were able to get the scholarships because the school that the Camps works with had some troubles sending their students and we were lucky to get the scholarship instead. However the Camp is still working with the other school, which is why I decide to create our own scholarship fund for La Paz Students.

When I was at Creek Camp I felt like I was in another world. Where we all like mini biologist in training and I was able to use the skills that I learned at La Paz during the camp. In La Paz we study water qualities in two years. First in 7th or 6th grade were we learn the basics, our project is to test the water of different estuaries from our surrounding communities and compare them. Then in 10th grade we use more professional equipment to do experiments on the different components that are used to test water such as pH or dissolve oxygen to understand their impact on water. Creek Camp is very similar, but we are also learning different information that we don't learn at La Paz, such as testing water qualities through the amounts and types of organisms that live in the area. Creek Camps is a good way to use our understanding and learn new aspects in Biology.

However the experience and learning doesn't stop there because the the counselors of the camp are college students from Allegheny college and Pittsburgh University who are interested in bringing their knowledge to high schools such as La Paz. The first Allegheny student to come to La Paz was William Tolliver, whose senior project is to help high schools start their own class room size aquaponics. This project is being done at La Paz with the mentoring of Will and all the hard work that Selene is putting in. Aside from college students, the Camp founder and College professor Jim Palmer came to La Paz twice in this school year to teach the science teachers how to use equipment donated by Creek Connects. With the equipment were are able to form part of the Creek Connections community which goal is to compare the water qualities of different water sources through the years and make sure that there are positive changes.
After only the visit that Selene and I had past July, our school create great contacts and sources for our science department and if we keep having the alliances with the Camp and College we will thrive even more as an environmental high school.