May 2016 – Team Marine

May 27, 2016

Bernie Sanders Rally

By Amanda Samimi

On Monday, May 23, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders held a rally at our school, Santa Monica High School. Many Sanders supporters, including some Team Marine members, were overjoyed to have a presidential candidate speak at their very own school. Bernie talked enthusiastically for little over an hour about the platform of his candidacy, which includes policies such as providing universal healthcare, raising the federal minimum wage, and perhaps most importantly, combating climate change.

In previous debates and speeches, Sanders noted that climate change is the most important issue facing Americans today, and Team Marine could not agree more. On Monday, he dedicated a few minutes of his speech to addressing the grave issue of global climate change, which happened to be one of the segments in which he received the most applause. We would like to thank everyone who helped plan and set up such a successful rally and would like to remind everyone in California to vote in the Tuesday, June 7th primary.

May 21, 2016May 27, 2016

Nothin’ But Sand

Another successful beach cleanup complete! On Saturday May 21, 2016 Team Marine and Marine Biology students attended Heal the Bay’s Nothin’ But Sand beach cleanup at Will Rodgers State Beach along with over 700 volunteers. All in all we ended the day by collecting around 110 lbs of trash off the beach, even though people were comme ting about the beach already looking trash free. Thank you to all the volunteers!!!

Side note: Heal the Bay just uploaded their 2016 beach report card for California, look up your beach to see if it is a ‘bummer’ beach or not here

May 1, 2016May 4, 2016

Streets to Sea

By Amanda Samimi

On Thursday, April 28, 2016, Amanda and Christa represented Team Marine and Santa Monica High School at the annual Streets to the Sea Challenge put on by Generation Earth. Five middle schools and five high schools traveled to Disney Synergy Lab in Glendale to display their environmental projects. The students were asked to create and implement a water-wise solution to a problem present on their campuses. Team Marine submitted their water fountain audit to enter the competition. The day started off with breakfast, a presentation from one of the judges, followed by a walk-around display of students’ projects, lunch, another presentation, and lastly awards. Each school was asked to make a tri-fold display of their project. Team Marine repurposed an iMac box into a tri-fold poster board. We included pi charts of our data, photos of water fountains, and slides from our presentation to the sustainability coordinator of our district.

Every school received a glass trophy for making it to this stage of the competition, but only one middle school and one high school received the grand prize of a boat trip on the Floating Laboratory. Both Santa Monica High School and El Camino Real High School received the same score from the judges, but El Camino was the ultimate winner. Team Marine would like to congratulate El Camino Real High School for the success of their grand-prize winning project. We would also like to thank Generation Earth for putting on the competition and choosing us as finalists.