Laguna Beach students record what they find on California Coastal Clean Up Day
Weekends typically promise high schoolers a reprieve from early mornings, but not this Saturday for a group of environmentally conscious and ambitious Laguna Beach High students intent on cleaning up their part of California.
Saturday was California Coastal Clean Up Day and the campus Fire, Land, Ocean Water Environmental Team — also known as FLOW — joined in the statewide effort for the first time since its inception in August to help sweep their beaches of trash.
The club was formed directly as a result to a program that advisor and English teacher David Brobeck helped spearhead at the high school to examine environmental issues through the lens of different fields of study.
Brobeck explained in an interview Friday that the intent of the FLOW program was to “give our students a broad look at the real life issues of climate change and sort of seeing it from the perspectives of math, science, social studies and storytelling and English.
“We’re really calling on our colleagues in other departments and we’re hoping that they not necessarily change their curriculums — we’ve got state standards we need to meet — but you can certainly potentially shift a couple of talking points to add relevance,” Brobeck said.
“For instance with fires ... you could look at how and why these happen. What’s the science? What’s the math behind wildfires burning bigger and brighter year after year?
“We’re trying to give our students real life topics and to see the applications in other classes where those conversations and curricular points haven’t been made in the past.”
It’ll eventually expand to a curricular level in January, but for now it’s a club with about 30 teens that Brobeck said are fairly serious about pursuing environmentalism.
He and his students made their way from the Aliso Plaza Shopping Center down to Treasure Island Beach and onward toward Aliso Beach to clean up litter and trash around Laguna.
Students recorded items that they picked up on the beach with an application called Clean Swell that keeps track of what is left or washes up on the shore, data which is then uploaded to a database for the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit ocean advocacy group that organizes International Coastal Clean Up Day.
That day coincided with Saturday’s cleanup.
“All of these kids have done beach cleanups forever, but this is a beach cleanup with a legislative purpose,” Brobeck said.
“I think, hopefully, this will be a really great experience for our students,” Brobeck added. “In the past, laws have come into place, like with no plastic utensils or cigarette butts or Styrofoam; all of those things have occurred really due to this day.”
California Coastal Clean Up Day began in 1985 and is typically held on the third Saturday of September. Last year’s efforts were slightly impeded by the arrival of the pandemic, which meant that people would not be able to have large gatherings to clean up beaches.
Organizers then decided to expand the cleanup to a month long.
More than 74,000 volunteers participated statewide in 2019, removing more than 900,000 pounds of trash from California’s coastline and nearly 17,000 people participated in a neighborhood clean up last year, according to the California Coastal Commission.
Other cleanup efforts also occurred elsewhere in Orange County, including in upper Newport Bay and Crystal Cove.
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