Lacombe Composite High School’s EcoVision club is no stranger to awards and praise for their continued outstanding and innovative projects. 

Recently, the club was announced as a finalist for the 2020 Emerald Awards in the Education Category, which EcoVision teacher supervisor Steven Schultz said is “known as the Oscars for the environment.”

The club was given recognition for their Roofs 4 Kids project that would see between two and six goats brought to live at the school, to be utilized in green initiatives and Agricultural studies. 

“It’s a really, really prestigious award for top organizations in Alberta that are doing environmental good work. To be recognized by them is one thing, but to be a finalist is another big thing,” Schultz said. 

Roofs 4 Kids integrates an animal sanctuary with a living roof that will house goats, who in turn will eat invasive weeds around the school and surrounding community and will enable the development of a new Animal Husbandry program for LCHS students. 

“I am very, very proud of all of our EcoVision students because they are courageous, they are leaders and they are innovators. They are setting our community and our world up for I want to say success, but it’s more than that - they are going to be our future hope.”

Finalists in the running will all receive an Emerald Award and logo recognition to support the status of the project, and final award recipients will receive a $2,000 grant. Additionally, the winners of the Education Category will also receive another $5,000 grant.

The final award winners will be announced on June 2, during Canada’s Environmental Week through an online ceremony.

A proposed desgin of the Roofs 4 Kids project that would provide a goat sanctuary, living rooftop and space for students to study the animals.

The accolades keep coming for agricultural and environmental groups at LCHS

The Emerald Award isn’t the only recognition being shone on the EcoVision club dreams right now. 

The group was also recently recognized through the Caring for Our Watersheds Award, which provides funding to programs generated by students to address issues within their designated watersheds. 

Lacombe Comp is situated within the Battle River Watershed and has been recognized in two different capacities by the CFW for innovative projects in the region. The first is Roofs 4 Kids, led by students Chelsea Smeltzer, Sneha Rose Jigo, JJ Duga and Gage Coffey. The second is a Manure Biofuel Generator, developed by Cadence Zukowski, Isabella Bessette and Hally Hunt as a response to the problem of excess manure from local farmers. 

Schultz said this began with his students writing essays on some of the problems within our watershed and providing potential solutions to those problems. Two of these solutions were presented and now recognized as being top contenders in the contest. 

The Manure Biofuel Generator is a way to address the issue of excess manure in some areas of the Battle River Watershed. When manure is spread over fields, excess runs into local waterways which can be poisonous to local species and create troublesome algae blooms. 

So, the students found a way to make that excess manure helpful to the community instead.

“Basically, it’s taking manure from an animal and then putting it into a container that will allow it to work with bacteria and the bacteria produce methane gas. The methane gas is then collected and you can either use it to cook or run a furnace. In this case, you could even take it and put it into a generator, heating up water, that turns into steam that turns a turbine that would turn a generator and produce electricity,” Schultz explained. 

Schultz says the key to their success is in their innovation and integrated community 

“I really integrate with my students the reliance on community expertise and community partnership. Nobody in our world can do things alone. If we’re wise, we will always seek our expertise help from others. We’ve been so, so fortunate in our community to be surrounded by brilliant people and people that are also so community-focused,” he said. 

“We underestimate the ingenuity, creativity and even the desire of our young people to want to make a difference I’m always blown away by the desire that my students have to really make a difference.”

He said it takes encouragement and resources for students to push their ideas ahead, and that they rely on local experts to help implement these solutions in a sustainable way. 

“To anybody who is reading this, please be ready to encourage a young person. If you have an expertise in a certain area, be willing to volunteer and share that expertise with somebody else. If that’s all that’s missing in some of our young people, then we are putting aside or not utilizing this untapped resource that’s available to our community.”

It’s encouraging both from the sense that our students have innovative ideas, but it’s also very encouraging that we have some community experts that can push the ideas that we have into reality.