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She also teaches a class at NYU called " Can Exercise Change your Brain?" To tap into the brain-boosting effects of movement, she begins each class with an hourlong workout session, followed by a 90-minute lecture and discussion. She has been measuring outcomes of this hybrid teaching method in quantitative and qualitative ways. "One student told me, 'In my other 9 a.m. classes, I am hugging my Starbucks cup. In this class, I don't even need to take notes because I remember what is said.'"

She says exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain, and she is on a mission to help her students and the public understand the "life-changing," mood-boosting, cognitive-enhancing effects of physical activity.
The Cognitive Benefits of Exercise
Suzuki encourages people to think about the brain like a muscle. Exercise strengthens both the prefrontal cortex (which is involved in executive functioning) and the hippocampus (which plays a key role in memory and learning). In this way, exercise supports our ability to think creatively, make decisions, focus and retrieve key information. In her research, Suzuki found a single workout can improve a student's ability to focus on a task for up to two hours.

Exercise stimulates the growth of new neurons, Suzuki explains, in a process called neurogenesis. In addition, it increases the neurochemical BDNF, which acts as a fertilizer, strengthening neurons and making them less susceptible to breaking down. Physical activity also increases levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine and endorphins that support emotional well-being, motivation and response to stress. As we age, exercise has a protective effect on the brain, says Suzuki, making it less susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline. With exercise, "you are making synaptic connections, and you are making more synapses grow. Movement will help your brain today and protect you against neurological decay in the future."
The Case for Movement in School
Recess has cascading benefits for children, says Suzuki. "It really has to do with what we know about how the brain works and how we can rejuvenate brain activity - particularly focus, attention and mood. When you cut down recess, you are removing time that kids can run around. And when they run around, their brains are getting a bubble bath of good neurochemicals, neurotransmitters and endorphins. These help memory and mood. A simple burst of exercise helps students focus better - to filter out what they do and do not need to pay attention to in class."

She argues that movement breaks in K-12 classrooms support the deep kind of learning that they should be striving for.

"Adults need this, too," says Suzuki, including teachers. "Even though it takes time from your workday, it will give you back time. You will be more productive if you take that time off. Even if it's just a walk up and down the stairs or a walk around the block. That is a surefire way to make your work more productive. It's how humans were built. We were not built to sit in front of a screen all day long. Our bodies and brains work better with regular movement. It's better than coffee."

Adding more movement to the school day is an attainable goal, says Suzuki. She points to a program called The Daily Mile , an initiative that started six years ago at an elementary school in Scotland. The head of school, Elaine Wyllie, "realized that students weren't looking healthy," says Suzuki, "so she asked teachers to take their students for a 15-minute walk or run every day." More than 8,000 schools in 65 countries - including half of all schools in Scotland - have now adopted this program. The website includes guidelines and tips for making the program accessible to all students with the aim of helping them become "fitter, healthier, and more able to concentrate in the classroom."
Reframing Exercise as Movement
Suzuki recognizes that "exercise can be a four-letter word" for some people - something that feels unpleasant or impractical, given the demands of life. So she has begun to talk about it as simply "movement" in her talks and workshops. One of her favorite "brain hacks" is taking a mundane task and making it more physical - such as "vacuuming like Mrs. Doubtfire."

"The thing is, there are so many ways to move your body," says Suzuki. "It's hard to get someone who does not exercise to move regularly. Once you get over the hump, you can start to be much more mindful and see and feel the immediate effects of exercise - you are literally changing your brain."

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How Movement and Exercise Help Kids Learn | KQED

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Exercising not only helps the body but it helps the brain. Schools are incorporating movement into the school day with activities like "The Daily Mile" to get kids active and prepared to learn.

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"When they let me know they had been working on rolling out this universal screener in the high school, that was amazing to me," said Brian Turner, CEO of Solvista Health, a community mental health center that embeds some staff members in Cañon City schools.

"We were hearing that no district would touch it because it felt so risky," he said. "To hear that they weren't fazed by that ... was really refreshing."

Colorado has one of the highest suicide rates in the country for both youth and adults. In Fremont County, which houses 13 prisons and where Cañon City is the county seat, suicide rates are well above the state average.

Leaders in the Cañon City district say instead of getting caught up in liability worries over the mental health screening, they focus on their responsibility to students.

"We were totally well aware when we started the [screening] process that we would open a can of worms," said Brian VanIwarden, the district's wellness coordinator. "Our job is to help these kids."

A statewide student health survey given every two years reveals just how prevalent thoughts of suicide are among Colorado youth. The 2017 version found that 17% of Colorado middle and high school students reported considering suicide and 7% reported making one or more attempts.

In the 3,500-student Cañon City district, the new mental health screening is part of a broader effort to better address students' social-emotional and mental health needs. Over the last two years, the district has also adopted new curriculum, partnered more closely with local mental health centers, and conducted teacher training on mental health topics.

Soon after VanIwarden took the wellness coordinator job in the fall of 2017, Murray proposed the idea of a universal mental health screening. He and other district officials learned more at a school mental health conference that October and spent subsequent months planning for a local roll-out.

The district chose a 34-question screening survey called the BIMAS-2. It was co-created by a University of Northern Colorado psychology professor and has been used in Boston Public Schools since 2012-13.

Cañon City high-schoolers took the survey for the first time last October. In April, it was administered again - in one grade each day for four consecutive days. Both times, more than 800 of the school's 1,000 students opted to take the voluntary survey.

The two BIMAS screenings last year cost the district about $2,000. Next year, district leaders plan to use the tool with seventh- and eighth-graders as well.

The screening survey asks students a range of questions about their thoughts and behavior during the previous week - for instance, whether they felt angry, maintained friendships, had trouble paying attention, or missed school.

And, of course, whether they had thoughts of hurting themselves.

"Research indicates that self-injury is often viewed as a coping mechanism and can be an indicator of depression and anxiety," Murray said.

Self-harm can take many forms, including cutting skin with a blade, intentionally causing bruises, or not eating. Thinking about self-harm doesn't always mean teens will act on it or that they're considering suicide.

"We don't want to just immediately leap to a place of, 'Oh my gosh you're self-injuring or you're having suicidal ideation,'" she said.

That's where the triage team comes in. Their job is to probe more deeply after kids report thoughts of self-harm on the survey - reaching out the same day in the most urgent cases.

At Cañon City High School last year, the team learned that some students had misunderstood the directions and weren't in dire need of help. Staff members talked to others about counseling services and helped them make phone calls to their parents.

In about a dozen cases - over the course of the fall and spring screenings - district staff identified students as high-risk and immediately referred them to community-based mental health crisis teams for formal evaluations. Some of those students, Murray said, had concrete plans to kill themselves.

"Without a doubt," she said, the screener saved lives.

Although being pulled out of class in the middle of a school day might make some students uncomfortable or defensive, Murray said the teens were more often relieved.

Some of the students said, "I was waiting for this. I was waiting for someone to know," she recalled.

Murray said when the district launched the screening, there were 29 secondary students receiving counseling in their schools through providers like Solvista. Now, because of the BIMAS screening and the district's growing partnership with community mental health organizations, there are 150 elementary and secondary students getting school-based counseling from those providers.

In addition, other Colorado districts have begun introducing the BIMAS after hearing about the work in Cañon City schools. The 2,400-student Woodland Park district administered the screening to middle school students earlier this spring and the 700-student Park County RE-2 district will begin using it in grades seven through 12 next school year.

VanIwarden said while the BIMAS screener helps identify students with urgent problems, it also serves as a barometer for overall student well-being and helps break down the stigma associated with mental health problems.

One of the biggest takeaways from the screening data was that many teens need more help coping with school and life. And not just kids who have obvious problems with grades, attendance, or behavior. The survey turned up plenty of high-achieving students with solid friendships and a raft of extracurricular activities who reported being unhappy.

"We weren't really 100% aware of the internal stress and anxiety they were feeling," Murray said.

Such findings point to the need to help students across all grade levels develop healthy ways to work through stress. And if the district can do that, its leaders hope they'll see the pay-off not just in future BIMAS data, but in student achievement results, too.

"We've got BIMAS giving us a moment-in-time study and we also have curriculum in place to address these issues," said VanIwarden, who has three school-age children.

"I'm very grateful that stuff like this exists," he said. "It's as important as learning how to read."

Colorado Crisis Line: 1-844-493-8255, coloradocrisisservices.org. You can chat online or text TALK to 38255.

Crisis Text Line: crisistextline.org. Text 741741 from anywhere in the nation to reach a counselor.

Mental health resources: From the Colorado Department of Human Services, including a list of community mental health centers and a searchable directory of mental health providers statewide.

Mental Health First Aid Colorado: http://www.mhfaco.org/. Classes teach participants the signs and symptoms of mental health challenges or crisis, what to do in an emergency, and where to turn for help.

Mental Health Colorado: https://www.mentalhealthcolorado.org/ This statewide advocacy organization offers a free mental health toolkit for schools.

Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado: www.suicidepreventioncolorado.org. The coalition works to reduce suicide through education and advocacy.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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'It's OK to not be OK:' How One High School Saved Lives with a 34-Question Survey

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Schools can be hesitant to screen students for mental health issues if school resources aren't available for follow-up care. But one district found ways to work with community organizations and mental health providers to identify and help those in need.

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Between 2010 and 2015 Twenge found the number of teens who answered "yes" to three or more of these questions increased significantly, from 16 percent in 2010 to 22 percent in 2015.

By far the biggest increase was among girls - who were six times more likely than boys to report these or other symptoms of depression.

Twenge says the gender difference in the findings might be because the screen experience for boys - typically playing computer games - is a lot different than it is for girls.

"For girls, she says, "a lot of social media revolves around concerns about popularity - am I going to get likes on this photograph, do I look good enough in this picture?

The study also looked at survey responses to questions about suicidal thoughts.

"These include things like depression, thinking about suicide, making a plan to commit suicide and then actually having attempted suicide at some point in the past," Twenge says.

Her team found an increase in suicidal thoughts over that time period and,according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an increase in suicide deaths among teens from 1,386 in 2010 to 1,769 in 2015.

Again, the finding about suicidal thoughts was strongest among girls.

Financial stresses and anxiety related to academics and homework are often cited as factors in teen depression. But the overall economy improved between 2010 and 2015, Twenge notes. And surveys suggest the amount of homework given over that time period did not increase.

What did increase significantly, she says, was students' online activity, via computer games and social media.

Her research found that teens who spent the most time on their electronic devices were more likely to also show signs of depression.

Meanwhile, she says, the surveys suggested that hours spent in face-to-face activities - sports, parties, even just going to the mall with friends - seemed to be protective.

Nonetheless, psychologist Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, takes issue with the researchers' conclusion that online activity is likely behind a shift in teen mood. Przybylski says teens may now simply be more willing to admit they are worried or sad.

"It could be that young people are reaching out, telling parents, telling friends," he says, "and certainly not feeling bad about filling out a survey about how they feel."

And the study doesn't eliminate the possibility that financial strains at home may have contributed to any genuine uptick in depressive symptoms among teens, says Przybylski. Even though statistics suggest the overall U.S. economy improved during the time period of the study, the researchers didn't explore what was happening in individual households in terms of job loss, for example.

Changes in a family's economic circumstances, he says, can be a leading cause of a child's depression.

Twenge responds that though her findings don't prove cause and effect, they are in synch with results from other studies, including some randomized trials - that have found that when people spend less time on electronic devices they tend to be happier and less lonely.

Twenge says the findings should spur continued research and, in the meantime, should serve as a warning for parents that if their teen spends lots of time online they may be at heightened risk of depression.

While the strength of the findings may be controversial, many parents worry about their child's reliance on social media, says Adam Pletter, a child psychologist in private practice in Washington, D.C.

Every day, Pletter says, he sees struggles between kids and their parents. Adults are often way behind, he says, when it comes to technology their kids are fluently using.

"We are digital immigrants," Pletter says. "We did not grow up with internet and cell phones - at least most of us did not. So there's a real dilemma, in that we're in charge of safeguarding our kids and teaching our kids how to be savvy digital users, and we don't have all the skills. Many of us are afraid of the technology."

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Increased Hours Online Correlate With Uptick In Teen Depression, Suicidal Thoughts

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Between 2010 and 2015 Twenge found the number of teens who answered "yes" to three or more of these questions increased significantly, from 16 percent in 2010 to 22 percent in 2015. By far the biggest increase was among girls - who were six times more likely than boys to report these or other symptoms of depression.

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Preventing and Reducing Youth and Young Adult Substance Misuse: Schools, Students, Families

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ED hosted a three-part miniseries on the opioid crisis. The first webinar looked at how the opioid crisis affected students and families, and the policies and practices that could help address the crisis in schools. The second webinar provided examples of how the opioid crisis was impacting schools and students and highlighted strategies to support students impacted by the crisis.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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The use of e-cigarettes is unsafe for kids, teens, and young adults.

Most e-cigarettes contain nicotine. Nicotine is highly addictive and can harm adolescent brain development, which continues into the early to mid-20s.1

E-cigarettes can contain other harmful substances besides nicotine.

Young people who use e-cigarettes may be more likely to smoke cigarettes in the future.

Find Data on E-cigarette Use Among Youth

E-cigarettes are electronic devices that heat a liquid and produce an aerosol, or mix of small particles in the air.

E-cigarettes come in many shapes and sizes. Most have a battery, a heating element, and a place to hold a liquid.

Some e-cigarettes look like regular cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. Some look like USB flash drives, pens, and other everyday items. Larger devices such as tank systems, or "mods," do not look like other tobacco products.

E-cigarettes are known by many different names. They are sometimes called "e-cigs," "e-hookahs," "mods," "vape pens," "vapes," "tank systems," and "electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS)."

Using an e-cigarette is sometimes called "vaping."

Some e-cigarettes look like regular cigarettes, cigars, or pipes.
Some look like USB flash drives, pens, and other everyday items.

E-cigarettes produce an aerosol by heating a liquid that usually contains nicotine, flavorings, and other chemicals that help to make the aerosol.

The liquid used in e-cigarettes often contains nicotine and flavorings. This liquid is sometimes called "e-juice," "e-liquid," "vape juice," or "vape liquid."

Users inhale e-cigarette aerosol into their lungs. Bystanders can also breathe in this aerosol when the user exhales it into the air.

E-cigarette devices can be used to deliver marijuana and other drugs.

News outlets and social media sites report widespread use of JUUL by students in schools, including classrooms and bathrooms.

JUUL is a brand of e-cigarette that is shaped like a USB flash drive. Like other e-cigarettes, JUUL is a battery-powered device that heats a nicotine-containing liquid to produce an aerosol that is inhaled.

All JUUL e-cigarettes have a high level of nicotine. According to the manufacturer, a single JUUL pod contains as much nicotine as a pack of 20 regular cigarettes.2

JUUL is one of a few e-cigarettes that use nicotine salts, which allow particularly high levels of nicotine to be inhaled more easily and with less irritation than the free-base nicotine that has traditionally been used in tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.

News outlets and social media sites report widespread use of JUUL by students in schools, including classrooms and bathrooms.

Approximately two-thirds of JUUL users aged 15 - 24 do not know that JUUL always contains nicotine.

Although JUUL is currently the top-selling e-cigarette brand in the United States, other companies sell e-cigarettes that look like USB flash drives. Examples include the MarkTen Elite, a nicotine delivery device, and the PAX Era, a marijuana delivery device that looks like JUUL.

Additional information about USB-shaped e-cigarettes and actions that parents, educators, and health care providers can take to protect kids is available at CDC's Infographic [PDF - 1.2MB]

Most e-cigarettes (vapes) contain nicotine-the addictive drug in regular cigarettes, cigars, and other tobacco products.

A CDC study found that 99% of the e-cigarettes sold in assessed venues in the United States contained nicotine.1

Some vape product labels do not disclose that they contain nicotine, and some vape liquids marketed as containing 0% nicotine have been found to contain nicotine.

Nicotine can harm the developing adolescent brain.2 The brain keeps developing until about age 25.

Using nicotine in adolescence can harm the parts of the brain that control attention, learning, mood, and impulse control.2

Each time a new memory is created or a new skill is learned, stronger connections - or synapses - are built between brain cells. Young people's brains build synapses faster than adult brains. Nicotine changes the way these synapses are formed.

Using nicotine in adolescence may also increase risk for future addiction to other drugs.2

When a person is dependent on (or addicted to) nicotine and stops using it, their body and brain have to get used to not having nicotine. This can result in temporary symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.

Nicotine withdrawal symptoms include irritability, restlessness, feeling anxious or depressed, trouble sleeping, problems concentrating, and craving nicotine.3 People may keep using tobacco products to help relieve these symptoms.4

Youth may turn to vaping to try to deal with stress or anxiety, creating a cycle of nicotine dependence. But nicotine addiction can be a source of stress.

What may start as social experimentation can become an addiction.

The most common reason U.S. middle and high school students give for trying an e-cigarette is "a friend used them." 5

The most common reason youth give for continuing to use e-cigarettes is "I am feeling anxious, stressed, or depressed." 5

Youth e-cigarette and cigarette use have been associated with mental health symptoms such as depression.9, 10

Yes. As long as a person stays quit, withdrawal symptoms will fade over time as the brain gets used to not having nicotine.

Scientists are still learning about the effects of quitting vaping on mental health. Quitting smoking cigarettes is associated with lower levels of anxiety, depression, and stress, as well as improved positive mood and quality of life.9

Scientists are still learning about the long-term health effects of e-cigarettes.

Some of the ingredients in e-cigarette aerosol could also be harmful to the lungs in the long-term. For example, some e-cigarette flavorings may be safe to eat but not to inhale because the gut can process more substances than the lungs.1

Defective e-cigarette batteries have caused some fires and explosions, a few of which have resulted in serious injuries.

Children and adults have been poisoned by swallowing, breathing, or absorbing e-cigarette liquid through their skin or eyes. Nationally, approximately 50% of calls to poison control centers for e-cigarettes are for kids 5 years of age or younger.

E-cigarette aerosol is NOT harmless "water vapor."

The e-cigarette aerosol that users breathe from the device and exhale can contain harmful and potentially harmful substances, including:

Nicotine

Ultrafine particles that can be inhaled deep into the lungs

Flavorings such as diacetyl, a chemical linked to a serious lung disease

Volatile organic compounds

Cancer-causing chemicals

Heavy metals such as nickel, tin, and lead1

The aerosol that users inhale and exhale from e-cigarettes can expose both themselves and bystanders to harmful substances.

It is difficult for consumers to know what e-cigarette products contain. For example, some e-cigarettes marketed as containing zero percent nicotine have been found to contain nicotine.3

E-cigarettes come in various flavors, including fruit, candy, mint, and menthol.

A study from 2013-2014 showed that most youth who use e-cigarettes first start with a flavored variety, and flavors are the primary reason youth report using e-cigarettes.⁶

In 2023, most youth who reported using e-cigarettes used flavored varieties (89.4%). Among middle and high school students who currently used any type of flavored e-cigarette in 2023, the most commonly used flavors were fruit (63.4%), candy, desserts, or other sweets (35%), mint (27.8%), and menthol (20.1%).¹¹

On January 2, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finalized an enforcement policy that prohibits the sale of prefilled cartridge e-cigarettes in any flavor other than tobacco or menthol, unless authorized by FDA. FDA has since taken additional steps to prohibit certain companies from selling youth-appealing, flavored disposable e-cigarettes and flavored e-liquids without authorization.⁷

Several states and communities have restricted the sale of flavored tobacco products, including menthol-flavored products.⁸

E-cigarettes are also advertised using the same themes and tactics that have been shown to increase youth initiation of other tobacco products, including cigarettes. In 2021, approximately 76% of students reported exposure to tobacco product marketing through traditional sources and approximately 74% of students who used social media had seen e-cigarette-related posts or content.¹²

Widespread advertising for e-cigarettes, including via media for which advertising for conventional tobacco products is prohibited (e.g., TV), and the lower costs of some e-cigarettes relative to regular cigarettes has contributed to use among youth.¹

Many youth also report using e-cigarettes because they are curious about these products.¹

Many young people who use e-cigarettes also smoke cigarettes.1 There is some evidence that young people who use e-cigarettes may be more likely to smoke cigarettes in the future.

Specifically, a 2018 National Academy of Medicine report found that there was some evidence that e-cigarette use increases the frequency and amount of cigarette smoking in the future.4

E-cigarettes also can be used to deliver other drugs, including marijuana; in 2016, approximately one-third of U.S. middle and high school students who have ever used an e-cigarette reported using marijuana in the device.

But e-cigarette use among young people is still unsafe, even if they do not progress to future cigarette smoking.

E-cigarettes expose users to fewer harmful chemicals than burned cigarettes.1

But burned cigarettes are very dangerous, killing half of all people who smoke long-term.

The use of any tobacco product, including e-cigarettes, is unsafe for young people.

Yes. In August 2016, the regulatory authority of the FDA was extended to cover e-cigarettes through the agency's "deeming rule."

Through authority granted by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA), FDA has authority to develop regulations that address the manufacturing, marketing, and sale of e-cigarettes.

There are some strategies that the FDA does not have authority to implement, such as including e-cigarettes in smoke-free policies or increasing the minimum legal sales age for these products, unless directed to do so by Congress. However, the FSPTCA does not prevent states and communities from including e-cigarettes in smoke-free policies or from regulating the sale and distribution of e-cigarettes. These types of strategies can include further raising the minimum legal sales age, licensing retailers, implementing price policies, and restricting or prohibiting the sale of tobacco products.

Yes. In 2018, the FDA expanded its successful youth tobacco prevention campaign, "The Real Cost," to reach the more than 10 million youth aged 12-17 who have used e-cigarettes or are open to trying them. The campaign educates youth about the potential risks of using e-cigarettes.

The "Real Cost" reaches teens where they spend most of their time: in school and online. The campaign is also placing e-cigarette prevention materials in high schools across the nation, both in school bathrooms and on educational digital platforms accessed by students during the school day.

Heated tobacco products (HTPs) like IQOS and Eclipse, sometimes marketed as "heat-not-burn" technology, represent a diverse class of products that heat the tobacco leaf to produce an inhaled aerosol. They are different from e-cigarettes, which heat a liquid that can contain nicotine derived from tobacco.

HTPs are available in at least 40 countries and several have been authorized for sale in the United States by the FDA. In 2018, few U.S. adults (2.4% of all surveyed, including 6.7% of people who currently smoke surveyed) had ever used HTPs. In 2023, 1.0% of U.S. middle and high school students, combined, reported having used heated tobacco products in the past 30 days.¹¹

Scientists are still learning about the short-term and long-term health effects of HTPs, but the available science shows they contain harmful and potentially harmful ingredients. Youth use of any tobacco products, including heated products, is unsafe.

It is important that we continue to modernize proven tobacco prevention and control strategies to include newer products entering the market such as HTPs.

Talk to your child or teen about why e-cigarettes are harmful for them. It's never too late.

Set a good example by being tobacco-free and ensure that your kid is not exposed to the secondhand emissions from any tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.

If you use tobacco, it's never too late to quit. For free help, visit smokefree.gov or call 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

Talk to your child or teen about why e-cigarettes are harmful for them. It's never too late.

Get the Talk With Your Teen About E-cigarettes [PDF - 5.2MB] tip sheet for parents. Start the conversation early with children about why e-cigarettes are harmful for them.

Let your child know that you want them to stay away from all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, because they are not safe for them. Seek help and get involved.

Set up an appointment with your child's health care provider so that they can hear from a medical professional about the health risks of tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.

Speak with your child's teacher and school administrator about enforcement of tobacco-free school grounds policies and tobacco prevention curriculum.

Encourage your child to learn the facts and get tips for quitting tobacco products at Teen.smokefree.gov.

Fact Sheet for Educators:

Conversation Card for Educators:

1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Smoking Cessation: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health, 2020 [accessed 2022 April 4].

2. Truth Initiative Mental Health x Vaping Headline Survey Internal Data - August 2021.

3. Gentzke AS, Wang TW, Cornelius M, et al. Tobacco Product Use and Associated Factors Among Middle and High School Students - National Youth Tobacco Survey, United States, 2021. MMWR Surveill Summ 2022;71(No. SS-5):1-29. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss7105a1.

4. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Health Consequences of Smoking-50 years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta, GA: US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health, 2014.

5. Birdsey J, Cornelius M, Jamal A, et al. Tobacco Product Use Among U.S. Middle and High School Students - National Youth Tobacco Survey, 2023. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2023; 72(44);1173-1182.

6. Cooper M, Park-Lee E, Ren C, Cornelius M, Jamal A, Cullen KA. Notes from the Field: E-cigarette Use Among Middle and High School Students - United States, 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:1283-1285. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7140a3

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Quick Facts on the Risks of E-cigarettes for Young People

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Learn quick facts on the risks of e-cigarettes for kids, teens, and young adults, including how they work, why nicotine is unsafe, what is in e-cigarette aerosol, and resources for parents to prevent their child from using e-cigarettes or help them stop.

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About one-third of the total population of the Great Lakes basin is in the Lake Erie watershed. Approximately twelve million people live in the watershed, including seventeen metropolitan areas with more than 50,000 residents. The lake provides drinking water for about eleven million of these inhabitants.
On this page:
About Lake Erie

During the 1960s water quality issues in the Great Lakes became a concern and Lake Erie was perceived to be "dying". By the late 1960s, Canadian and American regulatory agencies were in agreement that limiting phosphorus loads was the key to controlling excessive algal growth and that a coordinated lakewide approach was necessary to deal with the phosphorus issue. Open lake phosphorus concentrations declined due to the joint efforts made. These controls represented an unprecedented success in producing environmental results through international cooperation.

the smallest by volume

the shallowest

warms rapidly in the spring and summer

frequently freezes over in winter

average depth is only about 62 ft. (19m)

the western basin (about 20% of the lake), is very shallow with an average depth of 24 ft. (7.4m)

retention time = 2.6 years (a measure based on the volume of water in the lake and the mean rate of outflow)

most of the land area around the lake is urban or agricultural

17 metropolitan areas with populations over 50,000 within the Lake Erie basin

significant effects from urban and agricultural runoff

from Lake Erie Binational Nutrient Management Strategy, 2011

The Scientific Studies of the Physical Processes and Forces Affecting Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair

The lake is naturally divided into three basins that virtually function as three separate lakes:

The western basin is very shallow, with an average depth of 7.4 metres (24 ft) and a maximum depth of 19 metres (62 ft). It is the most turbid region of the lake as most of the lake bottom is covered with fine sediment particles that are easily disturbed by wind and wave action.

The central basin is quite uniform in depth, with an average depth of 18.3 metres (60 ft) and a maximum depth of 25 metres (82 ft).

The eastern basin is the deepest of the three basins, with an average depth of 24 metres (80 ft) and a maximum depth of 64 metres (210 ft).

The central and eastern basins change in the temperature at different depths every year.

Stratification refers to the layering that occurs, particularly in the warmer months, where a warmer, less dense layer of water (the epilimnion) overlies a colder denser layer (the hypolimnion). Stratification can occur in the western basin but does not last very long. Stratification impacts the internal dynamics of the lake physically, biologically and chemically, and this in turn affects the amount of dissolved oxygen present at the bottom of the lake.
NOAA Image Measurement of Depth of Water in Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair Image
Environmental Issues

Excessive algal growth in Lake Erie threatens the ecosystem and human health of a waterbody that provides drinking water for 12 million people in the U.S. and Canada.

Algae can persist for weeks during summer by blooms carried by winds and currents eastward through the lake.

Recent years have seen record-setting algal blooms and associated "dead zones" - oxygen depleted areas created when algae die and decompose set records in recent years.

These events negatively impact the lake's critical $12.9 billion tourism industry and world class fishery.

The Lake Erie watershed, the most populated of all Great Lakes basins, is very diverse. It is largely agricultural, intensively industrialized, and highly urbanized. About one third of the total population of the Great Lakes basin resides within the Lake Erie watershed.

Of all the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is exposed to the greatest stress from urbanization, industrialization and agriculture. Lake Erie surpasses all the other Great Lakes in the amount of effluent received from sewage treatment plants and is also most subjected to sediment loading due to the nature of the underlying geology and land use. Exposed agricultural and urban lands, particularly in southwest Ontario and northwest Ohio, contribute immense sediment loads to the lake.

Lake Erie is the smallest of the Great Lakes by volume and also the shallowest. It warms quickly in the spring and summer and cools quickly in the fall. The shallowness of the basin and the warmer temperatures make it the most biologically productive of the Great Lakes.

Eighty percent of Lake Erie's total inflow of water comes through the Detroit River

Eleven percent is from precipitation (rain and snow)

The remaining nine percent comes from the other tributaries

What EPA is Doing

Lake Erie LAMPS and Associated Reports

Lake Erie Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOCs)

Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Grants

​Cleveland Metropolitan Park District ($316,830) for invasive species control.

The Nature Conservancy ($650,000) for invasive species control.

IPM Institute of North America ($408,150) for agricultural watershed management implementation.

Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments ($497,258) for agricultural watershed management implementation.

Western Reserve Land Conservancy ($500,000) for agricultural watershed management implementation.

Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development ($500,000) for agricultural watershed management implementation.

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About one-third of the total population of the Great Lakes basin is in the Lake Erie watershed. Approximately twelve million people live in the watershed, including seventeen metropolitan areas with more than 50,000 residents. The lake provides drinking water for about eleven million of these inhabitants.

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Decades of industrial use degraded much of the Great Lakes' shoreline and waters. In recent years

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Recognizing white privilege begins with truly understanding the term itself.

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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In many societies, teenagers are repeatedly told - by adults, peers and popular media - that teens are more likely than younger children to take risks, ignore their parents, skip schoolwork and succumb to bad influences. But stereotypes are not destiny, a new study of Chinese middle school students suggests.

In the study, reported in the journal Child Development, researchers talked with students about the "stereotypes adults hold about teens," then suggested that the teenage years are in fact a time when youth take on greater responsibility. The researchers asked the students to describe specific examples of teens behaving responsibly at home, at school and elsewhere. They tracked how the students thought about teens and how they conducted themselves after this intervention, comparing them with control groups tasked only with describing teen behavior.

"We were interested in whether students' stereotypes of teens shape how they navigate adolescence," said University of Illinois psychology professor Eva Pomerantz, who conducted the research with Yang Qu, a former U. of I. graduate student and a professor at Northwestern University; and Guohong Wu, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.

"Rather than just telling them that teens are responsible, we wanted the students to generate their own examples that they had observed," Pomerantz said. "We wanted them to envision it and for it to be theirs."

Many societies stereotype teens as rebellious risk-takers. A new study challenges these stereotypes with a view of adolescence as a time of increasing responsibility and tracks how middle school students respond.

Graphic by Fred Zwicky

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In the first of two studies, "we found that we can change students' ideas about teens," Pomerantz said. "They were less likely than those in the control group to say that teens are disengaged in school and engage in risk-taking. They also were more likely to say that teens feel it is important to meet family obligations. The students actually saw teens as being more responsible than younger children."

This first study involved 124 students from two middle schools in Shanghai, with one control group and one intervention group per school.

In the second study, the team looked at 319 students from three middle schools, again with matched control groups. To avoid the possibility that the students were just reporting what they thought the researchers wanted to hear, the team separated the intervention part of the study - asking students to describe specific teen behaviors at home, at work and elsewhere - from the follow-up testing, which in this case involved the students reporting on their own behavior at the end of the day for the next three days.

After asking students to engage in an optional English-language word-search puzzle during a "break between the two studies," a second research assistant introduced them to the second part of the study: the daily reports, which students completed for the three days following the intervention.

"After this very brief intervention, we had students in the intervention group saying, 'I paid more attention in school; I took part in more discussions; I did my homework more; I didn't hang out with kids who get in trouble; I didn't lie and I didn't cheat,'" Pomerantz said. The students in the control groups did not report as much constructive behavior in the daily reports, however.

The students in the intervention group also did better on the word-search test during the break, the researchers found. Those in the control groups found, on average, about five words in the five-minute test. Those in the intervention groups found about 6.3 words on average, a 26 percent better performance.

"We now know that changing students' stereotypes about teens can influence their behavior - in the short term," Pomerantz said. "The big question is: Could we develop a program for long-term change?"

Pomerantz said she looks forward to conducting similar studies in the U.S.

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Study: Countering stereotypes about teens can change their behavior

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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In many societies, teenagers are repeatedly told - by adults, peers and popular media - that teens are more likely than younger children to take risks, ignore their parents, skip schoolwork and succumb to bad influences. But stereotypes are not destiny, a new study of Chinese middle school students suggests.

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Below you'll find a selection of sample questions from each of the thematic sections comprising the Stanford Survey of Adolescent School Experiences .

Academic Worry

How often does the amount of schoolwork you have keep you from getting enough sleep?

How often do you worry about school assignments?

How much do you worry about getting into the college of your choice?

Homework and Extracurriculars

On a typical weekday, how many hours do you spend on homework (do not include time spent taking taking breaks, texting, using the computer for non-academic work, etc.)?

In how many of your classes does the assigned homework help you learn the material?

During a typical week, from Monday through Friday, how many hours do you spend participating in extracurricular activities? (Do not include hours spent doing jobs or paid work.)

What is the main reason you participate in extracurricular activities (Please select one answer):

My parents want me to

It looks good on college applications

I enjoy the activities

I can hang out with my friends

I can learn new things

Other (please specify)

Mental and Physical Health

How much sleep do you typically get on a weeknight? On weekends?

How much sleep do your peers typically get on a weeknight?

Where do you typically keep your phone when you go to sleep at night?

To what extent are you confident in your ability to cope with stress?

In the past month, how often have you experienced exhaustion? Difficulty sleeping? Headaches?

Student Engagement

How often do you try as hard as you can in school?

How often do you enjoy your schoolwork?

How often do you find your schoolwork valuable?

Teacher Care and Support

Belonging at School

I feel like I belong at this school.

I feel that other students at this school like me the way that I am.

Academic Integrity

During the past school year, how often have you engaged in any of the following actions?

Working on an assignment with others (peers, parents, etc.) when the instructor asked for individual work

Getting questions or answers from someone who has already taken the test.

Using a false or forged excuse to obtain an extension on a due date or delay taking an exam.

Parent Goals and Expectations

How important is it to your parents/guardians that your schoolwork challenges you to think?

How much do your parents/guardians worry about you getting a bad grade in school?

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Student Survey Sample Questions - Challenge Success

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Below you'll find a selection of sample questions from each of the thematic sections comprising the Stanford Survey of Adolescent School Experiences . How often does the amount of schoolwork you have keep you from getting enough sleep? How often do you worry about school assignments?

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A working married mother of two described to me how she thinks through her daughter's exposure to certain TV shows. "I really tried to encourage and push Dora [the Explorer] as much as possible," she said. "It was like, okay, she is traveling around. She is cool. She speaks Spanish. She is a kid of color." The mom was not as keen on Disney, whose shows and movies, according to her, "are so white." She also mentioned the existence of a variety of racist tropes in certain Disney movies decades ago.

Speaking of that history, some mothers I talked to sensed an encouraging shift in their own lifetime. "I think it has improved a lot in the last 20 years since I was a kid," one said. "Growing up, I don't remember seeing a book with black faces in it." Lately, many black parents have embraced and applauded mainstream movies such as A Wrinkle in Time, Black Panther, and Hidden Figures for their positive depictions of blackness. "It's the first time in a very long time that we're seeing a film with centered black people, where we have a lot of agency," Jamie Broadnax, who founded and writes at the website Black Girl Nerds, told The New York Times Magazine in a piece about Black Panther.

Indeed, curation does not always mean censoring and subtracting-many parents go out of their way to add perspectives to their kids' media diets. Some mothers in my research remembered coordinating outings to theaters with other African American mothers and children to see 2009's The Princess and the Frog, the first and only Disney animated movie to feature an African American princess.

What is the end result of all this effort? Better self-images for children of color, parents hope. And sometimes, the beneficial effects can ripple outward. One working mother of three told me about when, while visiting a predominantly white private school, her daughter sat in with some current female students-all of them white-who were playing with baby dolls. Her daughter, upon entering the room and noticing that the girls weren't playing with the lone black doll, scooped it up, exclaiming, "Oh my goodness! Look at this beautiful black baby and her beautiful black skin!" The doll quickly became the center of attention, and the mother told me that in the coming weeks the school ordered additional black dolls to reduce disputes among the students who clamored over the original one. She told me it was her proudest moment as a mother.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Dawn M. Dow is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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The Never-Ending Task of Shielding Black Kids From Negative Stereotypes

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A working married mother of two described to me how she thinks through her daughter's exposure to certain TV shows. "I really tried to encourage and push Dora [the Explorer] as much as possible," she said. "It was like, okay, she is traveling around. She is cool. She speaks Spanish.

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Breaking Gender Stereotypes in the Toy Box (Published 2018)

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What toys children play with can influence the skills they learn and the possibilities they see for themselves.

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Since moving to the Cleveland area seven years ago, Malina Cano Rauschenfels has become accustomed to discolored water flowing from her faucet, although she has never fully understood the reason behind the yellow or brownish tinge.

Cano Rauschenfels, 41, who tutors schoolchildren in music from her Cleveland Heights home, occasionally sees the city of Cleveland's Division of Water notifications advising residents to avoid washing laundry because the sullied tap water may stain clothes - but that the water is still safe to drink. After cleaning brown sludge from her water filtration system, Cano Rauschenfels remains skeptical.

"I would be terrified to give my kids this water," she said. "Don't wash your clothes or do laundry, but drinking it is fine? What are the effects of that?"

For the past two decades, these outbreaks of tainted tap water have occurred periodically in late summer. They have stained plumbing fixtures, ruined loads of laundry, and produced odd smells and a metallic taste.

By all accounts, it has been a nuisance to many customers of Cleveland's water department, the nation's 10th largest water system that serves 1.4 million people. But it may be representative of a more serious issue tied to Lake Erie's "dead zone," a sprawling layer of deep water with so little oxygen that many fish can't survive.

As agricultural runoff and urban wastewater pour into Lake Erie, the nutrients and warmth of the shallowest Great Lake give rise to massive blooms of algae and bacteria. This plethora of microbes in Erie alone outnumbers the stars in the universe, according to scientists.

Each summer, when legions of algae and bacteria die, they precipitously fall to the lake bottom, and their microscopic corpses rot en masse. In the deeper waters of Lake Erie's central basin, the process of decomposition depletes the oxygen in the bottom waters.

When this oxygen-deficient water interacts with Erie's lakebed sediments and clay, heavy metals such as manganese and iron are released from the muck into the water. In particular, manganese not only causes discoloration but also has been linked to permanent neurological issues. Low-oxygen conditions also contribute to more caustic water that can slowly corrode lead and copper service lines over time and raise the potential for exposure to those metals.

Meanwhile, in the lake, once oxygen levels drop below a certain threshold, coldwater fish and bottom-dwelling aquatic organisms suffocate or are forced to migrate, turning much of the central basin's bottom waters into a dead zone.

Between the 1960s and the 2000s, the number of dead zones worldwide has doubled every decade as a result of human activities and a warming atmosphere.

Globally, scientists have identified more than 400 dead zones in ocean waters including the Gulf of Mexico, Long Island Sound and Chesapeake Bay. But freshwater dead zones, which scientists are learning may pose a risk to drinking water, exist throughout the Great Lakes, including Lake Michigan's Green Bay, Lake Huron's Saginaw Bay, Lake Ontario's Hamilton Harbour and Lake Erie's central basin.

Federal studies on climate change show the Midwest is experiencing heavier rainfall. This precipitation has swept more waste into coastal areas, a trend that has promoted larger algae blooms and oxygen deprivation. With a warming climate, dead zones are persisting longer, prolonging stifling ecological conditions and raising the probability for fouled water to wash into coastal drinking water intakes.

Just over a decade ago, levels of heavy metals in raw Lake Erie water climbed to problematic levels. Scientists and water treatment officials only then learned about the dead zone's potential effect on coastal drinking water and are still trying to understand how serious of a health risk it could be.

"It's mostly a nuisance, but it can be a health concern," said Ed Verhamme, a coastal engineer at LimnoTech, an environmental consulting firm that helps Cleveland track the dead zone.

Alex Margevicius, commissioner of the Cleveland's Division of Water, said treating water is now more complex.

"Here, in Cleveland, and in a lot of places in the Great Lakes, we worried about treatment and distribution: treating the water and sending it where it needed to go," he said. "Source, we didn't think about it for decades and decades. In the last 15, 20 years that has dramatically changed. We have focused on what goes on in the lake. What surprised me, as much as anything, is how complex Lake Erie is as an ecosystem; the biology, chemistry, the physics of what goes on is incredibly complicated."

Lake Erie's dead zone, which can span an area the size of Connecticut, lies mostly in deep, offshore waters. However, northeastern winds can push this water toward Ohio's shoreline, where it threatens a number of major municipal water intakes from Lorain, 30 miles west of Cleveland, to Ashtabula, 60 miles to the east.

When this happens, water treatment officials must act quickly to adjust the amount of certain chemicals in the treatment process.

In late August, Cano Rauschenfels went to fill a jug for her water filtration system with water from her tap and noticed it was "completely brown." The incident only justified her purchase of the pricey system capable of purifying municipal water and even filtering raw water from lakes and stagnant ponds.

When a friend called the Cleveland water department to inquire about the discoloration, Cano Rauschenfels learned the cause was elevated levels of manganese. Still, she and many neighbors didn't know what to make of that information.

"My sense is, most people are clueless," Cano Raushenfels said. "My kids ask, 'Why do you get water from (a filtration system)?' Based on their reaction, my guess is they are not using a filter at home - that no one thinks about it. They just assume it's safe."

The first known and most severe episode occurred in 2006. It was then that water treatment officials began to understand what they were dealing with.

The tell-tale sign was an incursion of cold water.

On Aug. 9, 2006, the temperature near the Crown Water Treatment Plant dropped from 77 degrees to 64, a sign that deep offshore water had engulfed the intake crib. A prevailing northeasterly wind blew across the lake, guiding low-oxygen water into three of the four water treatment plants. For more than a week, discolored water loaded with heavy metals was pumped throughout much of the distribution system.

Manganese, a prevalent element found in the lakebed, was one of the metals drawn into the water supply. In low amounts, manganese is an essential mineral that helps the human body with metabolism and bone formation. If consumed in excess, manganese can be a potent neurotoxin that causes long-term impairments that resemble Parkinson's disease.

The Environmental Protection Agency currently recommends that infants and pregnant and nursing women should not drink water with manganese concentrations above 0.3 milligrams per liter over a 10-day period. For healthy adults, levels should not be more than 1 milligram per liter. The agency also encourages water treatment facilities to keep levels below 0.05 milligrams per liter, the threshold at which discoloration can occur, but it does not require treatment plants to test the water for manganese or comply with the standard.

During the 2006 incident, which lasted up to 12 days, manganese concentrations at the Crown plant spiked above 1 milligram per liter at times.

Complicating matters, Cleveland was treating the water with potassium permanganate, a chemical that - at the right dose - can remove heavy metals like manganese. But if the correct amount isn't added, it can exacerbate manganese levels.

"If you have a groundwater system that gets manganese at a constant level all the time, you know how to treat for that," said Margevicius, the water commissioner. "When you get an event where there's an erratic bouncing up and down, you have to have the treatment match the level coming in. If you miss that, the amount of chemical addition to that can make it worse."

To remedy the problem, water treatment officials decided to increase the feed of chlorine, a disinfectant that can reduce manganese levels but at the expense of increasing other chemical byproducts.

Plant officials also had another problem. The raw water's pH, a measure of acidity or lack thereof, had plummeted, nearing a level in which it would be acidic. When treating lake water, some chemicals can further lower the pH. If the water becomes acidic, that could pose a problem to the lead and copper service lines that connect homes and businesses to water mains.

Cleveland Water adds an anti-corrosive substance to the water that coats residential piping, acting as a buffer.

"If the pH goes bad too long, that protective coating can start to break down, and you can start to get lead in the drinking water," Margevicius said.

During the 2006 incident, Cleveland officials didn't understand what was happening at their plants. Now, a network of buoy sensors acts as sentinels monitoring wind speed and direction, water temperature and oxygen levels.

For more than three years, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been reviewing this buoy data alongside water quality measurements from Cleveland water treatment plants to build an experimental dead zone forecast system. Unveiled to the public this year, the modeling system is intended to provide an advanced warning of incoming low-oxygen water, allowing Cleveland Water officials to adjust their treatment approach.

But even when computer models can anticipate low-oxygen water, problems still crop up.

Three months ago, plant officials were alerted by the new system. On the morning of Aug. 26, they noticed the manganese levels in the raw water were rising and pH was taking a downturn. But officials had a strategy.

The plant stepped up its infusion of sodium hydroxide, a corrosion control agent that raises the water's pH.

Then they halted their feed of potassium permanganate, an action they typically take when manganese levels hit the water discoloration level.

Cleveland Water employees fanned out across the northeast side because it is serviced by a facility with the deepest intake crib and the one that is typically hit the hardest by dead zone water. They opened hydrants to flush out the water before too much could reach their customers.

But as many as 21 of Cleveland Water's 80 communities still received advisories about discolored water and warnings not to wash laundry.

Testing at the last hydrant in an east Cleveland neighborhood revealed as much as 1.3 milligrams of manganese per liter, a reading officials said appeared to be "anomalous" because of contaminants built up at the end of a water main. Another measurement taken at another site was just shy of 0.3 milligrams.

This was one of eight instances this year when NOAA's experimental system warned lakefront communities of hazardous water conditions.

Officials say the late August alert was a mild occurrence, albeit one that kept them on their toes.

"In the early period of this event, it's almost like the fog of war," said Margevicius, referring to the delicate dance of implementing the proper measurements in real time.

Once the dead zone forms, the proliferation of manganese in the bottom waters lasts for months until fall weather arrives. When Lake Erie's surface waters chill, becoming colder and more dense than bottom waters, the entire lake mixes, rejuvenating oxygen levels in the deep water and dissipating the dead zone.

This mixing can release a large bubble of noxious gas from the dead zone. On Sept. 29, 2005, residents from Cleveland to Buffalo, New York, reported a pungent odor described as "rotten eggs" or "sewer gas." The mystery scent stirred up a "mild panic," according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as rumors spread about a natural gas leak or a possible chemical plant explosion, and emergency responders rushed to investigate in Pennsylvania.

It turns out the "big burp" of 2005 was a buildup of hydrogen sulfide gas produced by bacteria decomposing the heap of dead algae at the bottom of Lake Erie.

With climate change, warmer weather has appeared earlier in the spring and persisted later into the fall, meaning the dead zone and its accumulation of manganese and dead algae can be prolonged.

With sediment samples from Lake Erie's lakebed, scientists are simulating low-oxygen conditions in an attempt to gauge how fast manganese leaches from the soil into the water.

While the research is still pending review, Craig Stow, a NOAA scientist, said the preliminary data indicates that manganese pulled from the lake bottom "seems to come out pretty fast."

Scientists realize they still have much to learn.

Two years ago, researchers confirmed the existence of a dead zone closer to shore.

A water quality buoy positioned near one of Cleveland's intake cribs picked up on low-oxygen conditions in June 2017, much earlier in the year than when Lake Erie's dead zone typically forms. Verhamme, the coastal engineer, went to investigate, finding oxygen-depleted conditions near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River.

Each year since, this dead zone has returned.

"It appears the dead zone had always been that close, but there was never any monitoring there," Verhamme said. "No one had been looking for it.

The experimental forecast system assumed oxygen depletion started in Lake Erie's deep, offshore waters and spread outward. Now, it appears rotting algae can more easily expend oxygen levels in warm, shallow waters, forming another dead zone when the waters are still.

This can later merge with the larger, offshore dead zone that forms later in the summer.

Experts say the newly discovered dead zone may not be as much of a manganese threat, due to differences in the lakebed sediment near shore. But low pH is still a problem.

While that knowledge will lead to further investigation into the dead zone and hopefully a more accurate forecasting system, that doesn't assuage the worries of Cleveland residents like Cano Rauschenfels who have come to expect tainted water every summer.

"Does it take a generation of brain damage to let us know?" she wondered.

Great Lakes, High Stakes

Tribune reporter Tony Briscoe is reporting from each of the Great Lakes to reveal how climate change is creating new threats to the planet's largest system of fresh water.
Explore the series here.

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Cleveland residents are used to their water being brown, even if they don't know why. The answer lies at the bottom of Lake Erie.

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Since moving to the Cleveland area seven years ago, Malina Cano Rauschenfels has become accustomed to discolored water flowing from her faucet, although she has never fully understood the reason behind the yellow or brownish tinge.

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For ages for 10-19

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Community Project

Hello! This is Ryann, Divine and Jolie. We are doing our community project on Nicotine addiction and usage. Please help us out by answering these questions. None of them are required, so if you're not comfortable with answering them, you are allowed to skip them. Please try to answer as many as possible. Thank you for your participation! We truly appreciate it!!
Survey developed using YTS survey.You will not be in trouble for answering truthfully!

If you would like to see more from us you can contact us at: dontsmokeitsnotajoke@gmail.com and we are on Instagram @dontsmokeitsnotajoke_

Have you ever tried a Juul?

Have you ever smoked a Cigarette?

Have you ever tried Vaping?

Have you considered smoking?

Have you ever felt pressured to smoke?

Do you know someone who smokes? If so who?

If you smoke why do you smoke?

Do you think smoking is a stress reliever?

Do you know the effects of smoking?

Do you think your health is important?

If you said yes to the last question please explain

Do you think smoking is good for you?

If you said Yes or No to the last question why did you choose that answer?

Never submit passwords through Google Forms.

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This survey is for 5th a- 8th graders

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Zero Hunger Survey

The form Zero Hunger Survey is no longer accepting responses.
Try contacting the owner of the form if you think this is a mistake.

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This survey is to see how many people actually reognize how hunger is a problem.

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For grades 7-8

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This form is about you and we need you to answer honestly. Please! and Thank You!

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By: Aniyah Thomas, Xavier King, and Amiyah Hart

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This is a survey for stereotyping and how it effects the community. taking this servey will help with my community project while collecting data and other activities. Please make sure to put you honest oppinion in order to help the society. Kamryn

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This is a survay asking you about your platic usage.

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Reducing your meat and dairy intake can help mitigate climate change. Melissa Clark has ideas for how to do it deliciously.

A vegetarian riff on Indian butter chicken, this fragrant stew of chickpeas is spiced with cinnamon, garam masala and fresh ginger, and is rich and creamy from the coconut milk. Credit... David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

For all of my adult life, I've reveled in rare rib-eye steaks and oozing Camembert. I won't let go of my drumstick until I've gnawed off every bit of cartilage and golden skin, and it's best to not even talk about bacon so crisp that it won't bend for that first porky bite.

Yet over the past few months, I've cut way down on my lamb chops and grilled cheese sandwiches. And if you're a meat-and-dairy eater who aches over the environmental state of our planet, then you may be thinking of doing the same thing, too.

It started in the spring, when my Food colleague Julia Moskin teamed up with Brad Plumer from The New York Times Climate desk to report on how our current food system is contributing to climate change. The results were crystal clear and deeply depressing. Meat and dairy production alone account for 14.5 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - as much each year as from all cars, trucks, airplanes and ships combined. It's a staggering statistic.

I'd always considered my food choices to be outside the problem. I get a local farm box of produce every week, and frequent the farmers' market for more vegetables, as well as grains and ethically raised meat. I limit seafood that's not sustainable, and when I do shop at a supermarket I mostly fill my cart with organic whole foods that are not highly processed (the occasional bag of Cheetos aside).

Evidence is piling up, though, that this isn't enough to make an impact. Only drastic changes will make a difference. The World Resource Institute, an environmental research group, recommends that wealthy nations cut their beef, lamb and dairy consumption by 40 percent to meet global emissions goals for 2050.

Becoming vegan would be the most planet-friendly way to go, followed by going vegetarian. In my case, those diets would be a professional liability, and to be perfectly honest, I don't know that I've got the willpower to stick to either one. I love meat and dairy too much to give them up entirely. But eating less of them - that I can do.

On the upside, eating less meat and dairy means there is more room on my plate for other delectable things: really good sourdough bread slathered with tahini and homemade marmalade, mushroom Bourguignon over a mound of noodles, and all those speckled heirloom beans I keep meaning to order online.

So how much meat and dairy should we actually be eating? And if we reduce our intake severely, do we then need to worry about getting enough protein?

According to Marion Nestle, an author and professor emeritus of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, if you are getting enough calories, then you are getting enough protein. (That is, unless you are an elite athlete.)

"People are very concerned about protein, but it's a nonissue," she said. "It's in grains, it's in vegetables, it's everywhere. It will find you."

With that anxiety abated, I turned to setting a concrete goal: a balance of plant-based versus meat-and-dairy meals to strive for every week, like my daily 10,000 steps ( or should it be 15,000?), translated into broccoli and burgers.

After some mental calisthenics, I landed on trying to limit myself to two to three meals that include meat, seafood or dairy per week, and thrice-daily splashes of milk in my tea (nonnegotiable if I want to retain my sanity). I figure this is about a 40 percent reduction from the six to eight meaty, cheesy, anchovy- and yogurt-laden meals I had been eating weekly. (The rest were already meat- and dairy-free, and I don't typically eat breakfast.)
[Sign up for our Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter to get weekly recipe recommendations delivered to your inbox.]
Another way to strategize is to try keeping the daily mix of what you eat to 80 percent plant matter and 20 percent meat, dairy and seafood. (Going vegan all day, then having a small amount of meat or cheese with dinner is one way that people make this work.)

For my meat allotment, I've focused more on chicken, pork and local seafood (especially mollusks), which are generally less taxing to the environment than beef and lamb, both of which are now relegated to special-occasion status.

Of course, none of this is in any way a novel approach. The concept of flexitarianism has been around since the early 2000s, and it's a central tenet in much of Michael Pollan's writing. But somehow the term seems timeworn, and not at all evocative of the pleasures of the table.

I like to loosely think of my approach as mindful meat-eating. Now, when I do simmer up a pot of beef short ribs (or smear cream cheese on my bagel, or go for sushi), I'm thoughtful and deliberate about it, which makes it taste even more delicious, seasoned with anticipation.

And while the days of absent-minded chicken Caesar salads and oblivious cheese-and-cracker munching are for the most part over, the likes of avocado toast, salted cashews and popcorn covered with coconut oil and nutritional yeast can fill the void.

What follows is my own personal guide to eating less meat, and dairy too, with tips, strategies and plenty of recipes.

We are a family of bean lovers, so adding more of them to our weekly menu makes for happiness all around. To keep us from getting bored, though, I've widened the net, seeking out less common varieties like brown-dappled Jacob's Cattle beans and purple-swirled Christmas lima beans, along with my usual roster of chickpeas, lentils and cannellini.

I've also changed the way I think about chili, one of my go-to bean-based meals. I used to add a small amount of ground meat to my chili pot as a matter of course, unless I was making a specifically vegetarian chili. Now, I usually skip the meat - save for the occasional spoonful of bacon grease or lard for richness - and I don't miss it.

Beans are also excellent stand-ins for meat in certain recipes, like using chickpeas in a riff on Indian butter chicken, and filling tacos with black beans instead of pork. And there's an entire universe of dals that I'm continuing to explore.

When I can plan ahead, I like cooking all of my beans myself for better flavor and texture, not to mention the bonus of leftover bean broth from cooking, which tastes especially amazing if you add lots of salt and garlic to the bean pot. I always keep some of that broth in the freezer to use in soups and stews. If you love beans and don't have a pressure cooker (either manual or electric), you should really consider getting one. It cuts the cooking time in half.

That said, canned beans are one of the greatest supermarket convenience foods, ever. My pantry is never without them.

Yes, there's quinoa, the quick-cooking staple that fills many a grain bowl. But there's also kamut, teff, millet, wild rice, buckwheat, cornmeal and even pasta. Grains have a lot more protein than we often give them credit for, along with a host of other vital nutrients, especially when we eat them whole. (I'll always have a soft spot for white rice, though, whether it's steamed sticky rice, or basmati pilaf, or Carolina long-grain rice cooked into pudding.)

Grain bowls make diverse, ever-changing meals that I can throw together from whatever is in the fridge, anything from leftovers to condiments or both. These days I find myself putting together a grain bowl at least once a week, topped with roasted vegetables and some kind of savory sauce to bind everything together. These bowls never get boring.

But within this category, pasta is my first choice, and I adore it in every incarnation. And using toasted bread crumbs in place of Parmesan keeps the dairy quotient down, too.

Whether pillow-soft and fluffy or crisp-edged and browned, tofu is always welcome on my plate. This is not the case for the rest of my family, who give it the side-eye whenever I serve it. The trick in our house has been to pair tofu, which has a relatively neutral taste, with ingredients with pizazz - the more umami-intense, the better. Miso, soy sauce, mushrooms, hot sauce and fermented black beans do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Another strategy is to mix in a small amount of meat - ground chicken or pork, or a little bacon - to add a large amount of flavor. Cooking it all on a sheet pan makes for an easy weeknight meal.

I could sing the praises of toasted nuts, nut butter and tahini here, but you probably already know everything you need to about them. Whether toasted and chopped so they're satisfyingly crunchy, or puréed and seasoned to become alluringly creamy dressings or sauces, nuts and nut butters are a great way to round out a plate of roasted, steamed or raw vegetables.

What I really want to talk about is my newfound love of homemade vegan cheese (though I won't turn my nose up at store-bought nut-based queso dip, either). The best recipes I've tried are made from cashews, ground up with nutritional yeast and all manner of seasonings (smoked paprika, garlic powder, oregano), and then set with agar powder.

No, they don't taste anything like actual cheese. But when I rush home, ravenous and stressed after work, and there's some in the refrigerator that I can heap onto my Wheat Thins and nibble with my glass of wine, I don't miss Stilton nearly as much as I'd feared.

There's no denying how processed most vegan meats are, loaded with unidentifiable ingredients, but they do scratch the itch for burgers and meatballs. And plant-based sausages remind me of kishke, a traditional Jewish and Eastern European sausage made with beef and bread or grains, in a very good way. These products are often a starting point for people who want to cut down on their meat intake - and, with some brands, once that faux burger patty is stuffed into a bun and loaded with condiments, it may be hard to tell the difference.

Of the various kinds of vegan meats, seitan is my personal favorite. (A traditional meat substitute in Asia that's made from wheat gluten, it's the stuff of mock duck.) I truly enjoy seitan's chewy texture and lightly earthy flavor. As vegan meats go mainstream and the competition gets fiercer, seitan sausages, taco crumbles and bacon are getting tastier - far more so than their old, bland health-food store brethren. Unfortunately, as much as my 11-year-old likes the idea of a plant-based meat with a name that sounds like the Devil's, she doesn't actually like seitan. More for me.

Now that I'm eating less meat, every single morsel of it needs to hold its own. Which means I'm less likely to bother with a chicken breast when a smaller amount of Italian turkey sausage, sautéed until crisp and strewn over my spinach salad, delivers a lot more oomph. Or how about some duck confit? Assertively flavored cured pork - bacon, salami, prosciutto - add salty brawn to roasted vegetables and grains, pastas and salads, and a little goes a long way.

Then there's good, concentrated broth, whether it's bone broth or otherwise. Using beef broth in mushroom Bourguignon contributes tons of savory character without adding any actual meat. And making bone broth from scratch with the leftovers of your blowout holiday prime rib helps, at least a tiny bit, with the severe problem of food waste in this country. But really, make it because it tastes good.

Recipes: Mushroom Bourguignon | Indian Butter Chickpeas | Meatless Meatballs in Marinara Sauce | Quinoa Bowl With Crispy Brussels Sprouts, Eggplant and Tahini | Maple-Roasted Tofu With Butternut Squash and Bacon | Roasted Vegan Sausages With Cauliflower and Olives | Black Bean Tacos With Avocado and Spicy Onions

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The Meat-Lover's Guide to Eating Less Meat

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Reducing your meat and dairy intake can help mitigate climate change. Melissa Clark has ideas for how to do it deliciously. For all of my adult life, I've reveled in rare rib-eye steaks and oozing Camembert.

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Make 2020 the Year of Less Sugar (Published 2019)

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One of the best things you can do for your health is to cut back on foods with added sugar. Our 7-Day Sugar Challenge will show you how.

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When Michelle Martin thinks back on her teaching career, she identifies its starting point as second grade-not when her students were second graders, but when she was. Earlier this year, sitting in her office full of children's books at the University of Washington, Martin told me that her first pupil was a classmate, a little girl whose family had moved into Martin's neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina, and who "had had a turbulent childhood." Upon noting that her classmate was having trouble reading, Martin simply told their teacher not to worry-she'd take care of it. Martin remembers few specifics of the exact teaching strategy she used, but says her teacher later remarked to Martin's mother, "She taught that child to read!"

Decades later, as a professor who specializes in children's library services at the Information School at the University of Washington, Martin is still turning children into readers, and her mission has expanded to educating teachers and librarians about how to make students of all backgrounds eager to explore books.

Martin's day job is teaching graduate students, most of them future librarians, about children's and young-adult literature. (Her professorship is named for the librarian turned beloved children's-book author Beverly Cleary.) Martin's philosophy is that all children can become lovers of books, but that it's an educator's job to help them find the stories in which they can see or imagine themselves. In 2017, a study published by the American Library Association indicated that in the United States, some 87 percent of librarians were white. The pool of American teachers, meanwhile, is about 80 percent white, and children's literature as a genre is also overwhelmingly written by, and about, white people. Yet only half of American children are white -and Martin has taken note over the years of the ways in which the whiteness of school libraries and classroom book collections can alienate students of color, resulting in missed opportunities to foster a love of reading.

So Martin co-founded Camp Read-a-Rama, a summer program that started in South Carolina and then moved with her when she relocated to Washington. She's also a trusted resource for librarians, teaching them how to incorporate books by and about people of color into their libraries and story times.

Despite the ultimate shape of her career trajectory, Martin says she spent a good chunk of time resisting the idea of becoming an educator. Her parents and grandmother were teachers, and Martin was hesitant to do anything she felt might just be mindlessly falling in line. But she ended up teaching anyway: After graduating from college as an English major in 1988, she wanted a break from school before pursuing a Ph.D., and she found a job as an outdoor educator near California's Sequoia National Forest.

Upon accepting the role, "I had to do a little bit of PR work with my mother," Martin remembers. "She was like, 'Black people have been trying to get out of the woods for [generations]!'" But Martin fell in love with outdoor education. She taught kids about animal life cycles and the night sky, having them write haiku out on the trail and learn songs Martin herself had written about how to identify different kinds of animal poop. After two years, Martin left and got a master's in outdoor education. She spent the next two years working as a naturalist in South Carolina's Sesquicentennial State Park, 10 minutes from where she grew up.

Martin returned to school to earn her Ph.D. in children's literature in 1993. She began her classroom teaching career four years later and eventually ended up at Clemson University, a move she welcomed because it meant living in her home state of South Carolina. (Martin taught at Clemson for 12 years before taking on her current role at the University of Washington in 2016.) At Clemson, she told Rachelle D. Washington, an education professor she'd befriended, "about this idea I had of taking my [outdoor education] passion and my children's-lit passion and putting them together," Martin told me. "And she said, 'Let's do it.'" In 2009, they launched Camp Read-a-Rama.

Camp Read-a-Rama has been held in libraries, churches, schools, and affordable-housing complexes for formerly homeless families; Martin aims to "find the kids who really need to be there, and make sure that they can afford camp." Kids who attend also get books to take home, as research has demonstrated how important it is to childhood literacy to have a home library.

Often, local teachers who hear about the program reach out to Martin to recommend particular students who could benefit from attending. But kids who need the extra help, she added, are everywhere. Several years ago, when the camp was still in South Carolina, she pulled into her driveway on a 100-degree day while some workers were repairing her roof. "I heard, 'Papa, Papa! Can I get out of the truck?'" Martin remembered. A little boy was waiting in the car, and when Martin approached, he told her his grandpa was on the roof. "Papa and Grandma were raising him, Dad was in jail, and they couldn't afford child care. So Papa had to take him to work." Martin had him at Camp Read-a-Rama the following Monday.

Martin emphasized that what she and her staff teach at Camp Read-a-Rama is less reading and more the enjoyment of reading. In Martin's experience, reading becomes a more appealing prospect to kids when "you put them in an immersive environment where they're surrounded by books that they like," she said. "You've got a book that all of a sudden becomes an activity: You read about the wet dog, and then you're acting it out on the stage, or you're outside splashing around just like the wet dog did, for example." Martin refers to this approach as "reducing the distance between books and life."

Lauren Rizzuto, a former student and research assistant of Martin's at Clemson, worked with Camp Read-a-Rama in its early stages, an experience that informs how she teaches now as an adjunct professor of children's literature at Simmons University in Boston. "I kept a lot of that hands-on experience in mind when I was designing my course so that it wouldn't be purely reading books in a vacuum," she said.

In addition to teaching children and graduate students, Martin routinely advises librarians who want their libraries to better serve children and families of color. She has seen firsthand what she considers to be an ideal library setup: On a recent visit to Australia, she visited a library and was greeted by "rows and rows and rows of [books in] all the languages of the people who would be visiting that library-videos, magazines, from all these different countries," as well as in the indigenous languages of the aboriginal people of the area. "What a welcome, you know?" she recalled. "Structurally, it's already saying, You belong here. "

But Martin thinks it's important not just to have books that feature people who look and sound like their young readers, but to teach those books, too. To make this point, she is fond of reading books to librarians, such as Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James's Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, a children's book about the power of an artful barbershop haircut to boost self-esteem, with illustrations that star young black boys. She tells the librarians, "You might not know from experience [what some of the haircuts are], and some of the kids might not know, but you can do your homework and find out." It's okay, Martin adds in her workshops, for white educators to admit to kids that they're not familiar with certain things that might come up in books for diverse readers. "You can learn from kids," she said, "and they can teach you a lot of stuff, if you're willing to listen."
Read: Where is the black Blueberries for Sal?
Martin says participants in these workshops often tell her afterward that she got them thinking for the first time about how certain books might resonate differently, or fail to resonate at all, with kids of various backgrounds. Rizzuto, too, counts this among the key lessons she's learned from Martin: "She showed me that childhood doesn't look the same across cultures, classes, or races."

When Martin isn't teaching in a classroom (or writing children's-book reviews in her office), she's often swimming, biking, or hiking. She continues to mentor kids from diverse backgrounds in the outdoors, leading a troop of Girl Scouts (most of whom are girls of color) and doing "Girl Scout stuff" such as hiking and camping with her own daughter, who's 16 and extending a matrilineal line of Scouts into its fourth generation.

The field of nature conservation-like the fields of librarianship and children's literature-is overwhelmingly white. "Michelle was one of the first black people I met who understood what I was doing and what my passion was," said J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist at Clemson who is black and a friend of Martin's. Lanham spoke highly of Martin's career-long passion for exposing kids of color to the outdoors, noting that this exposure is good for environmentalism, too, since it can foster a lasting love of nature and win over more converts to the cause.

What Lanham has seen Martin do outdoors is what many of her colleagues and students have seen her do at Camp Read-a-Rama and in her classrooms and workshops: enable kids to venture into any space-be it a library or a classroom or a mountain preserve-and feel empowered to explore.
This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

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specifics of the exact teaching strategy

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When Michelle Martin thinks back on her teaching career, she identifies its starting point as second grade-not when her students were second graders, but when she was.

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BBC Sounds - We Can Change The World - Available now

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Available episodes of We Can Change The World

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In 2014, Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person in history to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - at the age of 17. Yousafzai, who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban and went on to become an activist for young girls and women everywhere, showed us that with drive and spirit even the most challenging circumstances can be overcome.

She also showed us that oftentimes it is the voice of a young girl, from a marginalized community, that can be the much-needed spark for large-scale global change.
Read more: Girl, 8, Gets a Handwritten Note From Her Superhero: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The resilience of young people, especially at a time when adults are butting heads over policies and politics, can play a role in lifting communities up and driving them to do better by those who are marginalized.

These nine badass youth activists, some of whom you may have not heard of, are challenging gender stereotypes, mobilizing their communities to care for the environment, and even speaking with presidents. They are igniting change in the world, and this is what we need to see.

1. Marley Dias

Marley Dias is an all-star reader who in 2016 organized a book drive, called #1000BlackGirlBooks, that delivered more than 8,000 books to young girls.
Read more: Malala Is Writing a Children's Book About a Magic Pencil & Fixing the World
Now, she's got a new project in the works: a book of her own. Scholastic has picked up the rights to Dias' new book about literary activism, which focuses on "the importance of literacy and diversity" and "delivers hands-on strategies for becoming a lifelong reader."

2. Sophie Cruz

In 2015, Sophie Cruz, five years old at the time, broke through security at a Papal motorcade to give Pope Francis a letter asking that her parents - who are undocumented immigrants - not be deported from the US.

Now six, Cruz is still on the front lines of advocating for immigrants' rights. Speaking at the Women's March on Washington in January, Cruz brought the house down. "We are here together making a chain of love to protect our families," Cruz said.

"Let us fight with love, faith and courage so that our families will not be destroyed," she added, before launching the crowd into a cheer of Si Se Puede! (Yes we can!).

3. Mo'ne Davis

In 2015, Mo'ne Davis showed the world that girls can play ball with the boys, and win. Davis, 13 at the time, became the first African-American girl to compete in the Little League World Series, the first girl to pitch a winning game in the LLWS, and the youngest athlete to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Aside from serving as a role model for young girls everywhere, Davis also has demonstrated an interest in serving others, as well. In 2015, she launched her own sneaker line, the proceeds of which went toward Plan International's Because I Am a Girl initiative, a movement to empower girls around the world.

"I never thought at the age of 13 I'd be a role model, but having young girls look up to me is pretty cool," Davis said. "If I can inspire them to reach their goals, that would be even cooler."

4. Kid President (AKA Robby Novak)
Read more: Watch Kid President's 2016 Campaign to End Child Hunger in the US
Everyone's favorite motivational speaker, Kid President (whose real name is Robby Novak), made headlines with his series of unconventional pep talks that have now garnered tens of millions of views on Youtube.

"If we're all on the same team, let's start acting like it," Novak tells us in that video. "We've got work to do."

In 2013, Novak was invited to the White House, where he was pictured sitting at President Barack Obama's desk in the Oval Office and giving Obama a hug.

A lesser-known fact about Novak is that he was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare disease that makes his bones break easily. He has broken more than 70 bones in his young lifetime, but has not let the disease slow him down in the slightest, continuing to preach unity and togetherness (and also skateboarding fearlessly).

5. Payal Jangid

After escaping from child slavery in Delhi, Payal Jangid, 14 at the time, became an advocate for girls' education, and won a World Children's Prize for her work with rural communities in India. She's now the leader of her town's Child Parliament, working to make her village " child-friendly " by educating the community about domestic violence and child marriage.
Read more: This Latest Lawsuit Against Trump Could Be the Hardest Hitting Yet
6. Avery McRae

In 2015, a group of 21 plaintiffs age 9-20 from Eugene, Oregon, took the United States government to court for burning fossil fuels. They argue man-made climate change challenges their future, and thereby their constitutional right to due process under the law, according to the Atlantic.

Avery McRae, the second youngest in the group, began her environmental activism at age five, raising $200 to save endangered snow leopards. Now, she's taken that activism to the next level, and imagines the court case could still be going on by the time she reaches high school.

We're looking forward to her running for office!

7. Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez

Much like McRae, Xiuhtezcatl (pronounced 'Shoe-Tez-Caht') Roske-Martinez is on the front lines of climate change activism. Roske-Martinez is the youth director of Earth Guardians and has been a speaker on climate change at the United Nations General Assembly and the Rio+20 United Nations Summit.

He also served on President Obama's 2013 Youth Council, and was one of the 20 kids to take the US government to court for climate change in 2015.

He gave his first speech at the age of six, and it was incredible.

"When I was 5-years-old, I wanted to go to all the factories and shut them down with my little brother," he said in that speech. "But once I turned six I realized that it was us that were buying from the factories."

He is wise beyond his years, and all of ours.

8 and 9. Melati and Isabel Wijsen

Melati and Isabel Wijsen founded Bye Bye Plastic Bags in 2013, after being inspired by classroom lessons on Mahatma Ghandi and other activists. Started on the island of Bali, Indonesia, the initiative aims to remove plastic bags from beaches, schools, and communities throughout the country.

Melati and Isabel's organization has grown from an idea to a youth-led organization with a 25-person staff and a board of directors. Thanks to their trailblazing work, the organization succeeded in lobbying the Bali airport to initiate a plastic bag ban in August 2016. By January 2018, the entire island of Bali was declared plastic bag free, with the country of Indonesia planning to ban plastic bags by 2021.

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9 Young Activists Who Are Making A Difference In The World Today

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These 9 youth activists are challenging gender stereotypes, mobilizing their communities to care for the environment, and even speaking with presidents.

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Image: Getty Images / Mashable Composite

In 2018, youth activism became synonymous with the gun control movement created by Florida high school students, who survived a mass shooting that killed 17 people.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students made headlines for months after the February shooting in Parkland. They began by calling for gun control, and then the floodgates opened. As they organized rallies, walkouts, a voting tour, celebrity partnerships (Cc: Mark Ruffalo), and get out the vote campaigns under the banner March For Our Lives, young people across the country made their voices heard.

The young activists made it clear they care about issues like immigration rights, climate change, and LGBTQ equality, too. Young people have often been at the forefront of social movements, but in 2018 they dominated social media conversations, news coverage, forced politicians to respond, and made headlines when they voted at historic rates. An exit poll showed about 31 percent of people aged 18 to 29 voted in the midterms, up from 2014's 21 percent.

And this is just the beginning, said Kirsten McConnell, a member of the senior leadership team for March For Our Lives, in conversation with Mashable and David Hogg, a cofounder of the activist group.

The movement is also about counteracting the perception that young people don't know enough to be activists, Hogg, who graduated over the summer, added.

Instead of following tired scripts, Hogg, 18, and his fellow activists, reminded young voters before the midterm elections that voting is personal because "politicians, quite frankly, don't care about us." They talked about job opportunities after college, student debt, and school shootings.

"All those things are centered around one thing and that's voting out corrupt politicians who don't see the youth voting bloc as something that matters," Hogg, who is taking a gap year, said. The midterms marked Hogg's second time voting; McConnell, an 18-year-old Marjory Stoneman senior, voted for the first time in November.

While March for Our Lives activists traveled throughout the country to register young people to vote before the midterms, McConnell came across plenty of critics who initially didn't agree with the movement.

"We need to have that conversation with people who don't always agree so we can learn from them, and half the time, when we really just sit and talk to them and take away all the different things the media skews about us, people can come to agree with us," McConnell said.

It's clear young people like Hogg and McConnell have been starting conversations throughout 2018, proving they can lead social good movements and make a difference. Here are 14 activists, including the Parkland teens, who have made an impact this year, in alphabetical order.

On World Children's Day, UNICEF named Millie Bobby Brown its youngest-ever Goodwill ambassador. The Stranger Things star teamed up with Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, and other ambassadors to encourage fans to sign the #GoBlue petition, a call to world leaders to fulfill and uphold children's rights. Throughout the year, Brown has used her massive social media platform to discuss important issues, such as girls' education, childhood cancer, and gun control.

She supported the March For Our Lives movement at the Kids' Choice Awards with a custom denim shirt and participated in the Time's Up movement at the Brit Awards and Golden Globes.

2. Edna Chavez, 18

Edna Chavez, an activist from South Los Angeles, delivered a powerful speech at the March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C. She reminded Americans that gun violence has been normalized to the point that she "learned to duck from bullets" before she learned how to read. The crowd chanted "Ricardo" to remember her 14-year-old brother, who died during a shooting. Chavez has since spoken at the Teen Vogue Summit and the #WeVoteNext Summit, an event organized to educate and inspire young voters.

Chavez told Assembly (the digital publication from Malala Yousafzai's nonprofit) that the 2016 election inspired her to join a youth leadership program run by advocacy group Community Coalition, which works to transform the social and economic conditions of South Los Angeles. Chavez worked with an attorney to educate her fellow classmates about their rights.

3. Ramon Contreras, 19

Ramon Contreras is the co-founder of Youth Over Guns, a student-led group that advocates for inclusive gun reform that protects people of color. (Youth Over Guns is now part of the nonprofit New Yorkers Against Gun Violence.) On June 2, Contreras and other activists carried a symbolic casket across the Brooklyn Bridge to demand gun control. Contreras continued his efforts throughout the summer and joined the March For Our Lives activists on their nationwide bus tour, registering young people to vote. He is the organization's national field strategist.

Mari Copeny, who most people know as Little Miss Flint, is the chief change agent at Pack Your Back, a nonprofit that delivers school supplies to children in her hometown of Flint, Michigan, and the founder of Dear Flint Kids, a project that encourages people from around the world to send letters to kids in Flint.

She brought awareness to the water crisis in Flint when she wrote a letter to President Obama. She was only 8-years-old at the time.

She has continued advocating for her community since then. She raised funds to give hundreds of kids the opportunity to see Marvel's Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time, and collected winter coats. Copeny spoke at Mashable's Social Good Summit and shared her five tips for becoming a young activist.

Most recently, she shut down Tomi Lahren when the conservative commentator tweeted "$5 billion spent on a wall will be the BEST $5 billion taxpayers EVER spent!" Copeny responded by saying $5 billion would be best spent on "water infrastructure upgrades and testing in schools."

In 2015, Marley Dias launched the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign to collect and distribute books featuring black girl protagonists. In 2018, she continued to promote "diversity and inclusion" at several speaking events and throughout her book tour promoting Marley Dias Gets It Done: And So Can You!The bookexplores activism, social justice, volunteerism, and includes an introduction by Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay.

Dias is also the president of SuperGirls Society, a leadership program for black girls. The program is part of the GrassRoots Community Foundation, "a public health and social action organization." She participated in the organization's Green Ribbon Week, a mental health campaign that aims to support young people.

Katie Eder is one of the founding members of the Future Coalition, a network of over 25 youth-led organizations. Together, they organized Walkout to Vote, the nationwide school walkout that encouraged students, no matter their age, to march to the polls on Election Day. Eder is also the executive director of 50 Miles More, a youth-led organization that advocates for gun reform. Eder and other high school students marched from Madison, Wisconsin, to Rep. Paul Ryan's hometown of Janesville, to demand gun control and stand in solidarity with the survivors of the Parkland mass shooting.

In November, Jazz Jennings filmed the short movie Denim, which aims to raise awareness about the discrimination trans youth experience in schools. Whether it's through her YouTube videos, her reality television series, or her Blindfold Magazine mini-documentary, Jennings has consistently been open about her experiences as a trans teen activist. She also teamed up with Dove's Self-Esteem project and television producer Shonda Rhimes to launch Girl Collective, "a sisterhood that builds body confidence and challenges beauty stereotypes for all women and girls."

8. Jamie Margolin, 17

Jamie Margolin is the founder of Zero Hour, a youth-led movement working to combat climate change, with a focus on marginalized voices. On July 21, she and other teen activists marched on Washington, D.C., to demand leaders enact long-term climate solutions. Margolin and 12 other young people sued her home state of Washington. After the case was dismissed, Margolin wrote an op-ed, explaining how the government's failure to address climate change violates her rights.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is the youth director at Earth Guardians, a group of young activists, artists and musicians that works to counteract climate change. Along with 21 young people, the organization is suing the federal government for its failure to address climate change (This lawsuit is separate from Margolin's). In addition to being a climate activist, Martinez is also a hip-hop artist. In 2018, he released his first full-length hip-hop album, Break Free, which covers climate change and the marginalization of indigenous people, according to i-D.

10. Desmond Napoles, 11

Desmond Napoles, also known as Desmond is Amazing, is an LGBTQ activist and drag artist. A video of him wearing a rainbow tutu at the NYC Pride Parade went viral in 2015. Since then, he launched the first-ever drag house for kids, which is currently under works, according to his website. On social media, he stands up against bullying and advocates for LGBTQ youth. His main message to his thousands of followers is "be yourself, always."

In September, Napoles participated in Change the Ref's back-to-school fashion show, in which models wore gas masks and bullet-proof vests to raise awareness about gun violence. Change the Ref was founded by Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin was killed during the Parkland school shooting. The nonprofit organization empowers young people to get involved in politics and help end gun violence.

Cameron Kasky, Jaclyn Corin, David Hogg, Emma González, Alex Wind, and many other students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, proved that young people can influence elections. Following the mass shooting at their school in February, González was one of the first voices to make headlines when she delivered her now-famous "We Call B.S." speech.

Since then, González and her fellow Parkland classmates have been working hard to demand gun control. They organized a nationwide march in the spring and a bus tour in preparation for the midterm elections.

Jammal Lemy, the March for Our Lives creative director, designed flag T-shirts with QR codes that you saw throughout the summer during the March For Our Lives national bus tour. When you scan the QR code, the shirt takes you to a voter registration page (genius!). Elle magazine reported that as of August 2018, about 10,000 people used the shirts to register.

The students also published the book Glimmer of Hope: How Tragedy Sparked a Movement, which supports the March For Our Lives Action Fund.

(Kasky was photographed alongside March For Our Lives activists as part of the 2018 TIME 100 Most Influential People list, but in September, he announced he was leaving the organization.)

Storm Reid, best known for her starring role in A Wrinkle in Time, advocated for girls' education, bullying prevention, and other important causes on social media. Reid also launched Bamazing, an initiative to promote self-love and encourage girls to believe in themselves. She designed so-called "You Are" shirts that say "you=extraordinary" and "you= inspiring," along with other accolades. Celebrities, including Yara Shahidi ( Black-ish) and Zendaya ( The Greatest Showman), have been wearing the shirts. Sales from the tees benefit LadyLike Foundation, an organization that offers workshops and classes to help girls in underprivileged communities reach their full potential, and Array Alliance, an independent film festival founded by Ava DuVernay.

In preparation for the midterm elections, Shahiditeamed up with NowThis and launched Eighteen x 18, an initiative to encourage young people to register to vote. In September, she hosted the #WeVoteNext Summit in Los Angeles. Celebrities like Lauren Jauregui and Laverne Cox, aswell as activists David Hogg and Nadya Okamoto, of PERIOD, a nonprofit that provides menstrual supplies to people in need, attended to support the cause. In partnership with Aerie, Shahidi designed a sweatshirt to raise funds for the Innocence Project, which helps free innocent people from prison.

14. Josie Totah, 17

In a Time essay, actress Josie Totah came out as a transgender female. The actress previously starred in Disney Channel's Jessie and Mindy Kaling's series Champions. On social media, she advocates for LGBTQ rights and other important causes. For example, she encouraged her followers to join the Trevor Project, which provides crisis and suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth, in its fight to end conversion therapy. The Human Rights Campaign this year awarded Totahthe HRC Visibility Award, which recognizes people who use their talent and platform to support LGBTQ people.
Correction Dec. 24, 2018, 10:04 a.m. PST A previous version of this post incorrectly noted the name of the shirts Storm Reid has been selling to promote self-love. They are called "You Are" shirts not bamazing, which is the name of her initiative.

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The youth activists who proved critics wrong in 2018

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In 2018, youth activism became synonymous with the gun control movement created by Florida high school students, who survived a mass shooting that killed 17 people. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students made headlines for months after the February shooting in Parkland. They began by calling for gun control, and then the floodgates opened.

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The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. It provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day. The program was established under the National School Lunch Act, signed by President Harry Truman in 1946.

Program Fact Sheet

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The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. It provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day. The program was established under the National School Lunch Act, signed by President Harry Truman in 1946.

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School lunch programs making a difference

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School lunch programs making a difference

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Over 31 million children in the United States consume most of their daily caloric intake at school. For many children, it may be the only food they eat regularly each day. But improving the quality of school lunches offers an effective way to ensure that half of what children eat is healthy, nutritious, and sustainably grown. School lunch programs that source organic, local, nutritious, and sustainable foods impact children's health and also the health of our planet. Food Tank has compiled a list of 16 school lunch programs making strides to improve children's health.

1. The Baltimore Public School System, Baltimore, Maryland: The public school system in Baltimore was the first to adopt "Meatless Mondays," which benefit students' health as well as the environment. BCPS serves locally grown fruits, vegetables, and milk, and teaches its students how to grow their food at Great Kids Farm, a 33-acre teaching farm.

2. The Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley, California: The Berkeley Unified School District is committed to serving nutritious, delicious, and locally grown food to students. All processed foods, hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, refined sugars, refined flour, dyes, nitrates, additives, and chemicals are banned. Local, organic milk is served throughout cafeterias in addition to organic fruits and vegetables as much as possible.

3. The Burlington School Food Project, Burlington, Vermont: The Burlington School Food Project provides free breakfast and dinner to 4,000 students in the Burlington School District. The project is dedicated to serving local food from farms in the area and was chosen as a model Farm to School program by the USDA in 2010.

4. Farmhouse Café and Bakery, El Prado, New Mexico: The Farmhouse Café sponsors school garden projects, which serve over 450 meals a day at participating schools and teach children how to grow vegetables and make healthy food choices.

5. The Finnish National Board of Education, Finland: Finland was the first country in the world to serve free school meals dating back to 1948. School meals are designed to support students' health and to give them energy for their studies. Local fish, vegetables, fruit, and grains are featured on students' plates to form tasty, colorful, balanced meals. Finnish law requires that half of the plate be filled with fresh and cooked vegetables.

6. The French Ministry of National Education, France: School children in France are required to sit at the lunch table for at least a half an hour to eat a full meal. Fried food, foods high in fat, ketchup, and sweets are all limited. Meals are well-balanced and include vegetables, a warm main dish, cheese, and usually fruit for dessert. The government charges families on a sliding scale, which averages US$2.56-3.12.

7. The Healthy Schools Campaign, Chicago, Illinois: Over 350,000 students in Chicago public schools eat healthier food thanks to the Healthy Schools Campaign. Produce is regionally grown, and chicken is raised without antibiotics in nearby Indiana.

8. Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research, Italy: Rome has an incredibly progressive school food program. About 150,000 meals are served daily at 740 public schools. Ninety-six percent of meals are made from scratch, and 70 percent of ingredients are organic. Much of the produce and meat is local or regional, and menus reflect the seasonality of crops grown in the region.

9. The Good Earth School Lunch Program, Marin County, California: Over 4,000 children in twelve schools throughout Marin County participate in the healthy, organic, and nutritious Good Earth School Lunch Program.

10. Kitchen Garden Project, United Kingdom: Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched the Kitchen Garden Project to teach primary school children in the U.K. how to grow, cook, and consume fresh and local produce. The Kitchen Garden Project believes that introducing children to fresh fruits and vegetables at a young age is crucial to developing life-long healthy eating habits.

11. Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan: In Japan, school lunch is referred to as Shokuiku, which translates to food and nutrition education. The free school lunch program aims to promote mental and physical health and is based on government-established nutritional criteria. The program encourages sustainability by promoting environmentally friendly food production in local communities, encourages table manners, and celebrates the enjoyment of eating.

12. Shelby County Nutrition Services, Tennessee: Over 110,000 students are served breakfast and lunch daily at Shelby County public schools, where Nutrition Services focuses on providing nutritious, healthy food to improve educational achievements. Nutrition Services are connected with the Farm to School Movement, which aims to serve healthy meals in school cafeterias, provide agriculture and nutrition education, improve student nutrition, and support local and regional farms.

13. Ministry of Education South Korea: Over 800,000 school children in the public school system in Seoul receive hot, healthy lunches at school. The healthy and nutritious meal reflects Korean cuisine. Students are served protein, rice, kimchi (pickled vegetables), and other vegetables on the side.

14. The Sitka "Fish to Schools" Program, Sitka, Alaska: The Sitka "Fish to Schools" Program aims to enhance students' understanding of local seafood resources by including locally-caught seafood in the school lunch program. Students also receive education about the local fishing culture.

15. Urban Sprouts, San Francisco, California: Since 2006, Urban Sprouts has partnered with schools throughout San Francisco to provide garden-based education in which students experience planting, growing, harvesting, and consuming crops directly from the school garden.

16. Wellness in the Schools, New York, New York: Wellness in the Schools (WITS) encourages healthy eating, environmental awareness, and fitness as a way of life for public school kids in New York City. WITS forms partnerships with school leadership, teachers, chefs, coaches, parents, and kids, to develop and implement programs that provide nutritious foods, environments, and opportunities for kids to play, learn, and grow.

Join the Conversation:

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Sixteen School Lunch Programs Making a Difference

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Over 31 million children in the United States consume most of their daily caloric intake at school. For many children, it may be the only food they eat regularly each day. But improving the quality of school lunches offers an effective way to ensure that half of what children eat is healthy, nutritious, and sustainably grown.

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About the Author: Michelle Gugger graduated from Rutgers University in 2008. She is currently spending a year of service at EPA's Region 3 Office in Philadelphia, PA as an AmeriCorps VISTA.
I remember all throughout school, all the plates and cups in the cafeteria were polystyrene. For the students, if we were buying lunch we had no choice but to use the polystyrene dishware. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't know the negative impacts on the Earth that we were all creating by using these products, or that because polystyrene is non-biodegradable, the dishware that I threw out after lunch would still be floating around in the environment today and continue to do so years from now.

Polystyrene creates waste that just does not go away. In what ways then do you think polystyrene will impact our environment? One of the most important ways, I feel, will be the health of our land and water environments. I've already seen polystyrene dishware floating around in streams and in parks. This is not only ugly to look at, but it's also dangerous for the animals if they eat it. In addition to affecting our land and water environments, polystyrene impacts our environment by releasing pollutants into the air. In 1986, the EPA identified 57 chemical byproducts that were released into the air through its production and many of the pollutants are known to cause serious health effects such as the reduced functioning of the lungs and nervous systems. Check out Earth's Resource's website to learn about the ways polystyrene can affect our health and environment.

So let's reduce our impact! Reduce air pollution and the waste in our environment by taking action. How can you do this? Can you think of ways to influence your school to change their polystyrene-only policies? How? Every year Americans waste enough polystyrene that it could circle the Earth 426 times. Let's protect our health and keep our environment clean by reducing this waste-and choose a different alternative to polystyrene.
Editorial Correction: The first version of this blog posting incorrectly used the term styrofoam® instead of polystyrene foam. Comments to the blog also reflect this misuse of the term. The DOW Chemical Company is the owner of several registrations for the trademark Styrofoam® which is used on Dow's plastic foam insulation and construction products for use in residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, and on floral and craft products. The term was incorrectly used in the blog as a generic description of foam products. We regret the mistake and any inconvenience this may have caused.
Editor's Note: The views expressed here are intended to explain EPA policy. They do not change anyone's rights or obligations. You may share this post. However, please do not change the title or the content, or remove EPA's identity as the author. If you do make substantive changes, please do not attribute the edited title or content to EPA or the author.

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EPA is providing this link for informational purposes only. EPA cannot attest to the accuracy of non-EPA information provided by any third-party sites or any other linked site. EPA does not endorse any non-government websites, companies, internet applications or any policies or information expressed therein.

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Climate for Action: Choosing an Alternative to Polystyrene

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About the Author: Michelle Gugger graduated from Rutgers University in 2008. She is currently spending a year of service at EPA's Region 3 Office in Philadelphia, PA as an AmeriCorps VISTA. I remember all throughout school, all the plates and cups in the cafeteria were polystyrene.

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The used lunch trays Emily Fox took home about four years ago from the loading dock outside her elementary school were gross, some still plastered with ketchup. ¶ Emily stacked the trays in piles of 10. She wanted to know just how many polystyrene lunch trays Piney Branch Elementary School students went through in a day. "Three hundred and twenty-five," said Emily, now 12 and a middle school student. "And they all go into the incinerator and get burned and it's very unenvironmental." ¶ For more than four years, Emily and other members of the Young Activist Club in Montgomery County have been asking the Board of Education for a dishwasher at Piney Branch. They want to phase out foam for something greener, but their lobbying and fundraising, which has netted more than $10,000, have yielded little success. ¶ From Maryland to Illinois to California, environmentally minded students are pushing to remove polystyrene trays from cafeterias and replace them with compostable, reusable or recyclable alternatives. But change has been slow. School districts say that they want to go foam-free but that tight education budgets, infrastructure limitations and the relatively high prices of earth-friendly materials are often insurmountable hurdles in difficult economic times.Even in Portland, Ore., known as one of the greenest cities in America, some schools still serve lunches on styrene-based, disposable trays.

"I hate serving on Styrofoam, but when push comes to shove, you have to decide where you're going to spend the money," said Gitta Grether-Sweeney, director of nutrition services for Portland Public Schools.

For decades, environmentalists have shunned polystyrene (better known by the name of Dow Chemical's trademarked Styrofoam) because it is slow to biodegrade and litters oceans and landfills.

Corporations and municipalities have taken note. McDonald's stopped using foam burger boxes about 20 years ago. Jamba Juice plans to replace foam cups with paper ones in its stores nationwide by the end of 2013. And hundreds of cities and towns have passed laws banning polystyrene food containers.

But reform has been spotty for the nation's school systems.

"We tend to be very resistant to change," said David Binkle, director of food services for the Los Angeles Unified School District. "We're very rigid."

Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest public school district in the nation, switched to compostable paper trays in August. The change got national attention after middle school activists strung up a 30-foot tower of foam trays in a tree to spotlight the waste.

On Friday, the Hermosa Beach City School District in Southern California started replacing foam trays with recycled paper trays once a week, thanks in part to the advocacy of Max Riley, a fourth-grader at Hermosa Valley School, and his sister Reece, a second-grader.

"No Foam Friday" will run through the end of the school year, and the siblings say they're pushing for permanent change.

Max said he worries about the health repercussions of littering Earth with foam.

Across the country, student activists have rallied to get foam lunch trays out of schools because "our young people care about the planet they're going to have to inhabit," said Dawn Undurraga, a nutritionist with the Environmental Working Group.

"You have 31.8 million children in the school lunch program each day, and multiply that by 180 school days and that comes out to quite a bit of trays if they're all disposable," Undurraga said.

But even young Max knows that there are economic realities to consider.

"Foam is very popular because it's really cheap," Max said. "And 3 cents extra per tray doesn't sound like much, but in the big scheme, it is thousands of dollars, which I don't really mind but a lot of people do."

Grades of Green, a nonprofit group, seeks to empower students such as Max to make positive environmental changes, and it has helped more than 150 schools in 25 states implement policies that make campuses greener.

Said Kim Martin, the group's founder: "It's definitely a dollars- and-cents issue for a lot of schools, so it's important to look at what makes sense for schools not just from an environmental benefit, but also from a cost standpoint."

The Portland school system spends about 7 cents each for paper trays, compared with 3 cents for foam trays.

Montgomery County school officials estimate that converting to non-polystyrene products would add $1 million to the cost of the more than 5 million trays students use annually.

But making the switch doesn't always cost more.

In 2010, the New York City Department of Education implemented " Trayless Tuesdays. " Officials estimated that the move diverted 2.4 million polystyrene trays from landfills each month and was cost-neutral.

Binkle said the Los Angeles district negotiated with suppliers when it moved away from foam, saving the school system at least $1 million on the 120 million lunch trays students use annually.

Trays made from recyclable materials can end up in landfills if composting facilities are not available on site, as is the case at some Portland and Los Angeles schools. And students have to be trained to clean trays, which can't be recycled if contaminated with bits of food or grease.

That's why the Young Activist Club at Piney Branch doesn't want anything but reusable trays and a dishwasher.

"It's pointless to have composted paper trays if you can't compost them," 11-year-old Anna Brookes said.

There are few, if any, facilities to compost paper trays at Montgomery schools.

In the Washington region, Loudoun County Public Schools and D.C. Public Schools use compostable or reusable trays. The D.C. school system also has dishwashers for reusable, plastic trays in 12 schools, and D.C. city contracting policies prohibit the use of foam.

Montgomery schools spokesman Dana Tofig said the county system has several other environmentally minded initiatives. But allowing Piney Branch to buy a dishwasher is a complicated decision in a system that has nearly 150,000 students.

"You can't do something at one school without a plan to expand it," Tofig said. "It becomes a fairness argument."

Montgomery officials have estimated that it could cost more than $70,000 to install and operate a dishwasher at Piney Branch, far more than the $10,000 students have raised. The Young Activist Club, however, has estimated a one-year pilot program could cost as little as $11,000.

The Montgomery Board of Education heard Piney Branch students' pleas again this summer, but members didn't vote to authorize a pilot program. Instead, the board adopted a resolution aimed at reducing the school system's overall carbon footprint.

"Board members felt very strongly if the system is going to do something like this, it needs to be replicated across the district," said member Patricia O'Neill (Bethesda-Chevy Chase).

Fairfax County, like Montgomery, sends polystyrene trash from public schools to an incinerator whose heat is used to generate electricity. Fairfax officials estimate the electricity powers 96,000 homes. Fairfax schools quit using dishwashers in the 1980s, saving millions of gallons of water annually, according to county officials.

"The issue with dishwashers is the waste water that is lost and the chemicals that go into the waste process are very harmful because you're talking about sanitizers and detergents," Binkle said.

Grether-Sweeney also said dishwashers, which require maintenance, may not always be practical. There are labor costs involved in operating the dishwashers, and schools built decades ago aren't always equipped to handle the electrical demands of running a machine that will heat water enough to kill germs.

Nadine Bloch, one of the parent advisers to the Young Activist Club, said students often tell her that those answers aren't good enough.

"There are some adults that get really stuck in the wrong place," Bloch said she tells the students. "That's why it's good there are youthful activists who can tell people that things have changed and there's a necessity for moving on and looking forward."

Emily Fox, who counted the discarded trays at Piney Branch, said she, Anna Brookes and the rest of the Young Activist Club aren't going to quit lobbying for a dishwasher.

"The students do care," Emily said. "They should care, because we're going to be the next generation, and we're going to change things."

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It's not easy to replace foam lunch trays with greener options, school officials say

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The used lunch trays Emily Fox took home about four years ago from the loading dock outside her elementary school were gross, some still plastered with ketchup. ¶ Emily stacked the trays in piles of 10. She wanted to know just how many polystyrene lunch trays Piney Branch Elementary School students went through in a day.