Students Find World of Ideas to Celebrate Earth Day

EARTH DAY: South Bay students celebrated Earth Day last week with an array of activities ranging from a poster contest in Torrance to the completion of a living science laboratory in Manhattan Beach.

At Rancho Vista Elementary School in Rolling Hills Estates, for instance, students marched around the campus with robots

they had made from recycled cans, plastic cups, boxes and aluminum foil.

The Hawthorne School District treated students on campuses throughout the district to talks on recycling by volunteers from Northrop’s Aircraft Division in Hawthorne.

And dozens of high schoolers participated in an Earth Day celebration at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center meeting hall April 22 that included speakers and information booths on everything from recycling paper to composting.

The event, which was co-sponsored by the Palos Verdes/South Bay Audubon Society and the Palos Verdes/South Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club also included an environmentally themed poster contest that drew more than 200 entries from schools throughout the South Bay.

But perhaps the most permanent legacy to Earth Day was found at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, where more than 100 students, teachers and parents finished planting Eco-Land, a “living science laboratory” on the campus.

The laboratory, which was funded in part by a $15,000 grant from Chevron’s El Segundo Refinery, is actually a 1,000-square-foot garden that includes desert, forest and swampland ecosystems, as well as a greenhouse, a waterfall pond and a refurbished recycling area.

Eco-Land is the brainchild of biology teacher Dan Sponaugle and maintenance director Carl Leach, who wanted to provide science students with a source of locally grown plants, insects and bacteria for study.

“We felt working with students and getting them to understand the earth is the best way for us to help change some of the problems in the environment,” Leach said.

READERS REWARDED: Students at Arnold Elementary School in Torrance learned last week that reading really does have its rewards.

The lesson came in the form of a promise: If the entire kindergarten-through-fifth-grade student body could log more than 400,000 minutes of reading time in a six-week period, the students would be treated to a campus beach party.

To reach the goal, each student had to spend at least 100 minutes a week reading. Kindergartners weren’t exempt, but their parents had to read to them for the equivalent time period.

The students more than exceeded the goal, posting 430,320 minutes of reading time between March 1 and April 9. And last Friday, they reaped their reward when teachers and parents converted the playground into a surrogate beach complete with wading pools, sand toys and picnic lunches.

The students, many of them dressed in bathing suits, played with squirt guns and Frisbees and were even allowed to throw wet sponges at Parent-Teacher Assn. board members.

PTA members organized a similar event last year but students only had to read 240,000 minutes to qualify for the award. Parents and teachers upped the goal this year because they knew that the students could meet a higher standard.

“What’s more important than reading?” said Kathy Cohen, a PTA board member.

CAREER DAY: North High School in the Torrance Unified School District hosts a daylong career conference today that will feature workshops, speakers and seminars on job opportunities in everything from aerospace to medicine.

Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert is among 80 speakers who will hold panel discussions during the fair, which is scheduled to run from 8:15 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. All of the school’s 1,800 students will participate in the program.

Items for the weekly Class Notes column can be mailed to The Times South Bay office, 23133 Hawthorne Blvd., Suite 200, Torrance CA 90505, or faxed to (310) 373-5753 to the attention of staff reporter Kim Kowsky.