Stand-out Sycamore students place first in environmental challenge

An environmental science project by six students at Sycamore Canyon Middle School in Newbury Park won a first-place award in the recent Edison Challenge competition, sponsored by Edison International and the University of Southern California. The students' entry, a community service campaign and a lesson plan, was judged the best of a group of projects submitted by 30 teams from 15 middle schools.

Members of the winning team are Erin Zisman, Alex Vesling, Jared Cummings, Remington Parker, Justin Tan and Austin Mason. Their faculty adviser was Pamela Bluestein.

The Sycamore Canyon students won the Edison Challenge with a project centered on environmental issues associated with the disposal of old, nonrechargeable batteries. The students created a lesson plan that included a PowerPoint presentation and a play that they wrote and performed. They showed the presentation and performed the play to classes at three different schools, and they also ran their own community service campaign. They went door-to-door to collect dead batteries and gave 2,400 of them to city officials.

The Edison Challenge is open to high schools and middle schools in areas served by Southern California Edison, and the team from Newbury Park won first place in the middle school division. The award was recently announced at a recognition event at the Cabrillo Aquarium in San Pedro. The event is organized by Southern California Edison and the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies.

The firstplace prize for the Sycamore Canyon students and their adviser will be a seven-day trip to the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island.