Desert Wind Middle School students wrote and produced a video on Maricopa’s air-quality problems that captured $70,000 in a national competition, and they now are turning to Facebook to fatten that sum to $110,000.
Students and faculty are reaching beyond the boundaries of the Maricopa Unified School District hoping to enlist supporters throughout the state to vote for the Desert Wind video – the only Arizona winner in the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest.
A panel of judges will decide four grand prize winners from among the 12 student-video finalists to win an additional $30,000. A fifth grand-prize winner — the community choice winner — is a vote of the people and garners an additional $40,000 for the winning school.
People can vote once a day until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time March 12.
Representatives from the top five winners will go to Washington, D.C. for an awards ceremony.
“We actually have the best staff, the best students and we’re all competitive,” said Principal Joe Veres. “There’s never a time when they didn’t want to win this contest. I always knew we were going to win this thing.”
The video sprang from a grant request in November made by Michael Russoniello, the science teacher at Desert Wind for STEM and seventh- and eighth-grades.
Desert Wind was in the top 25 out of 1,500 applicants receiving a video production kit with a Samsung laptop, camcorder and Adobe software. Using that equipment, the school produced the video.
By Jan. 31, participating schools had to show through STEM studies – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – how the environment can impact a community.
From the beginning, “Our kids knew there was a bigger picture, we needed to improve the community,” Veres said.
The video was a joint effort of about 35 STEM students and tech students of Studio T, the school’s daily live news program.
Desert Wind is a school that, because of its location near agricultural, has many unsafe air-quality days, and the students, Veres said, “wanted to tackle the air-quality issue as a way to better our school.”
STEM students consulted with city of Maricopa staff about the problem, talked with a pediatrician about asthma issues, constructed air-quality monitors, and learned CPR from the district’s director of nursing – videotaping the entire process.
Social studies and tech teacher William Lange said the students “came up with their own script starting off introducing Maricopa as a town because this was going nationwide, and showed how our school is raising awareness and helping to solve the issues.”
Lange said he was excited for the students when the school won the initial video production kit, and now the $70,000 award – which likely will be a 50-50 split between hardware and software.
“It’s giving them the taste of professional tools,” Lange said. “It gets them drooling over it, and it excites me that we can offer this and the students can take this into the rest of their lives.”
Fourteen-year-old Samantha Corrales narrated the video. The eighth grader is the school’s student body president and makes daily announcements and helps host assemblies.
“I suppose they thought I would be a good candidate,” she said. “I rehearsed it sooo many times, countless.”
“I’m so proud of our teachers, our students for getting our name out there and doing something good for our community, and getting Maricopa out there,” she said.
Voters can compare tallies on the website. Currently, Desert Wind is trailing the top vote-getter by several thousand.
“We’re the only school in Arizona, so we’re trying to get all Arizona to support us,” Lange said.
