East Liverpool Students premier PSA on damaging effects of flushable wipes
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EAST LIVERPOOL -- After spending more than a semester researching the damaging effects flushable wipes can have on the water lines and creating PSAs (public service announcements), the students in East Liverpool City Schools Potter Brainery program proudly showed their video PSAs during a celebration of education held Thursday afternoon at LaCroft Elementary School.
The PSAs were a part of a grant funding learning initiative with TelPi, which funded the grant, to help students learn about and solve problems the community currently faces.
Tiffany Hayes, TelPi program coordinator, said Telpi is an after-school program, and this program serves as a beta program to get the program into the schools for next year.
"With TelPi, what we do is take an issue in the community and leverage it with the power of learning in the class with industry involvement," Hayes said. "In this area there is a really big issue with flushing the supposed flushable wipes. They are destroying the pumps, all the motors and everything."
Hayes said the program was designed to get the children involved and bring awareness to the problems and offer a solution. She also noted the children use a variety of educational skills such as language arts, math, science, communication and more during their involvement in the program geared for third- through fifth-grade students.
Students worked with teachers, associates from TelPi, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a representative from the Salem Water Department. Drawing on their STEM education, the students had to do research, develop hypotheses and conduct science experiments to prove flushable wipes are not flushable.
The students then created the PSAs to bring awareness of the disaster flushable wipes create within the community's plumbing systems damaging the water infrastructure. At the end of all their research, the solution the students came up with to prevent damage to the pump stations from flushable wipes is to not flush the wipes.
The students were divided it teams, boys against the girls, to see who had the best PSA. The girls were led by teachers Laura Smith and Maryann Crook and the boys were led by teacher Sarah Yocum.
The students were given a chance to talk about the PSAs when they introduced their PSA before they were shown. Scout Desantis, 9, said "the program was amazing, and this commercial is just to save billions and thousands of dollars."
Multiple students said they loved the program and followed that with a reminder to not flush wipes.
Vadin Buckel, 11, said she learned during the program that the community wouldn't have to waste so much money and could save money on repairs if people didn't flush the wipes. He said his favorite part of the program was an experiment in which they put the wipes, toilet paper and paper towels in different containers of water to see how they would break down.
Jacob Smith, 9, said he most enjoyed making the PSA video and that the most important thing he learned is not to flush wipes down the toilet and that he won't be doing that anymore.
Carsyn Maola, 9, said the most interesting thing she learned was everything and she enjoyed everything. She also said she really enjoyed acting in the video and the math and STEAM they used.
Chloe Stephens, 8, said she already knew before participating in the program not to flush wipes because her parents taught her that and that the most interesting them for her was learning new math skills and she enjoyed the STEAM-based projects.
Ashlynn Bednarek, 9, said to her the video was the most interesting part of the program and that she learned how a lot of wipes end up stuck together clogging up the pipes.
Naeviana Monteiro, 11, said she loved the program and was sad that the fifth graders would not be able to do it again next year.
When Bob Kobet of TelPi asked how many parents after supporting their children in the program are going to flush their wipes, not one parent raised their hand.
Jennifer Galanis, program coordinator for after school programming, said approximately 50 students were registered in the program, and they had an average of 25 to 30 students on a regular basis participating
"I thought the kids did an excellent job with generating the information and research. They did research every Thursday from November to April to put together a commercial," Galanis said. "They did a really nice job interacting with TelPi while they were doing a couple of hands-on activities with the kids, and they got to hear about how much money it cost the county to pay for cleanups from all this and how that's taking away valuable resources from the county that could be spent elsewhere."
kgarabrandt@mojonews.com