Highland Park High School

On Tuesday, June 11, 2024, at a ceremony at Governor Phil Murphy's home, The Drumthwacket Foundation, in Princeton, students from Highland Park High School's Environmental Club received an incredible honor. Selected from three finalist schools including Metuchen High School and Marine Academy of Science and Technology, Highland Park High School won first prize and a $3500 grant for the film submitted by Lily Solomon, Sophie Hutner, Kate Schwartz, Isaac Backenroth, and Callum Crowley. These students documented how they addressed a major climate crisis issue - Food Waste, by collecting food scraps from our High School cafeteria lunch and composting this waste for our school garden. When these student determined that they were not collecting enough food waste to make an impact, they began collecting fresh food that would have been thrown away from our local Farmers' Market each Friday and donating it to the Global Grace cafe and Food Pantry in town so it could be used to prepare low cost, affordable, or free meals for our community. We are so impressed by these students efforts and appreciate that our Environmental Club Advisor, Mr. James Mokracek, helped to inspire them to enter this challenge! Amazing work by the whole team. Check out the video they submitted for this challenge at this link.