Drinking water and staying hydrated is one of the most important parts of a teen’s health. Despite it being crucial to stay hydrated throughout the school day, it can sometimes be a hassle when it comes to the water fountains that are currently installed in our school. Why you ask? Well for one, the positions in which our fountains are set up are kind of awkward when you try to fill your bottle, and who even knows the level of freshness and cleanliness our school’s water? A lot of students feel that our water is sub-par, so all these questions and complaints could easily be answered with the installation of a few water bottle filler stations on our campus.
Do you have your own reusable water bottle, a Hydroflask maybe? If you answered yes, you’ve probably needed to refill it at school and in doing so you had some trouble, right? This was probably because of the configuration of our water fountains, and all traditional water fountains for that matter. Standard water fountains in any public place are situated so you can bend over and drink directly from them, but they’re not to fill your bottle up. But who has time to get up and take a sip of water whenever you get thirsty? Whether you’re in class or walking around the mall, having a drink from your own personal bottle is more convenient, and simply more hygienic. FIlling your water bottle at an awkward 45-degree angle certainly isn’t the most effective way to go about getting water into our bottles. It leaves the bottle half-empty at best and causes water to get everywhere.
Besides having an easy, convenient, and free water fountain, we also need to take into consideration the quality of the water in our fountains. Nine out of ten times, the water coming from the water fountain is warm and foul-tasting, some students describe it as tasting like iron. I can assure you that everyone goes to the office water fountain to fill our bottles or to even have a sip of water because it at least tastes fresh. But now we’ve seen that the office fountain has been broken since the beginning of the school year, and we don’t even have access to the cold water that we would all much rather prefer. How long will it take to get that fixed? Who knows. We also can’t be one hundred percent sure where the water comes from and how healthy it is to ingest. With a water bottle filler or two, we could ensure that we would be receiving good quality, good tasting, and refreshingly cool water.
Reducing the amount of waste we, as a school, produce is another crucial factor to take into consideration when discussing water intake at our school. We all see the plastic water bottles scattered around our schoolyard that are hardly ever picked up and recycled. By installing some water bottle fillers in a few locations on our campus, we could reduce waste and motivate students to bring their own reusable water bottles. Using reusable water bottles are not only better for the environment, but also better for our health. Drinking from disposable plastic water bottles can lead to chemical leaching, which is when heat causes the toxic chemicals from the plastic to be released into the water. Who would want to fall ill from just drinking normal water? We know that Hydroflasks and Thermoflasks are the craze nowadays, so this could be an excuse to convince your parents to buy us one!
In hopes of convincing our school leaders to purchase some permanent water bottle filler stations at our school, I decided to start a petition to show how much the students at Eagle Rock would want water bottle fillers. I have gathered almost 200 signatures from students in all grades, and I hope to soon broach this subject to Ms. Keipp, and maybe even the school board, to achieve our goal.