Belleville High School LifeSmarts Team Attends National Convention
Share
Tweet
Photo courtesy of Abby Beyerl
From left to right: Otto Anson, Joseph Sokol, Grace Schulting, Mr. Erik Farrar, Grace Przybyl and Brock Kelly.
The Belleville High School LifeSmarts team: Grace Schulting, Grace Przybyl, Joseph Sokol, Otto Anson, and Brock Kelly competed in the national LifeSmarts competition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 21-24.
LifeSmarts is a National Consumers League program that offers educational opportunities for 6th-12th grade students. Teams prepare and compete in consumer challenges that focus on five key topics: consumer rights and responsibilities, the environment, health and safety, personal finance and technology.
Under the direction of Mr. Erik Farrar, Belleville High School Business Education Teacher, the Belleville LifeSmarts Team took 27th in the nation as a team. Joseph Sokol took 5th place in his individual Consumer Rights test. The Belleville team also won the People's Choice award for their t-shirt design. Both Przybyl and Schulting won awards for their positive posts on Twitter at the conference.
For their project, Belleville's LifeSmarts team conducted a food waste audit in the Belleville High School Cafeteria. They planned the audit, set up the experiment, addressed the student body, took measurements, analyzed data, ran comparisons and reflected on the information. The team then proposed solutions to the School Board. Some of their proposed solutions are to have school lunches contain fewer wrappers on food products to cut-down on waste, donate uneaten or unopened food to shelters and get the word out about food waste. Here's what the Belleville LifeSmarts Team has to say about their food waste audit, "At the beginning of this experiment, we didn't really think about the waste we produced until we were forced to capture it and weigh it. If school implements a monthly or even bi-monthly food audit, waste would probably see a decrease just because students would be aware of the problem. Being more knowledgeable would allow students to take this issue into their own hands." The team plans to visit the other Belleville schools to teach younger students and help reduce food waste in the district.
Congratulations to the Belleville LifeSmarts Team for their efforts in Belleville's first-ever venture in this national competition!
