Students at St. Pius elementary school in Tecumseh are looking to protect the environment one sewer at a time.
The school's robotics team is getting set to roll out its 'Save the Fish' program by painting bright yellow fish on manhole covers as a reminder to residents to not pour pollutants down storm drains.
Grade 7 student Santo Beninato is helping with the initiative and says clean water is essential.
"Water is one of the three most important things you'd ever need in life, the other two are food and shelter, and we really need water. We need healthy water, not water that has been contaminated with chemicals and pollution."
Grade 8 student Selena Rezler agrees and says many people don't realize the impact they're having when they dump chemicals.
"Chemicals are going into a drain and you may not think that it's a big problem, but actually it's for our health," she says. "Since water is the basic unit of life we want to help to uncontaminate it and make people aware that these chemicals are also killing our wildlife. We need to step up and do something so this doesn't continue."
A shot from the St. Pius robotics team's 'Save the Fish' presentation (Photo by AM800's Zander Broeckel)
Rezler explans the idea to paint on streets evolved from a talk they had in class one day.
"We just had an idea to stop chemicals from going into the lake from farming chemicals. Then we thought, since this is such an important issue that we have to address, we might as well just make a campaign. Basically it just came up from our idea of just wanting to help uncontaminate the water."
The team will begin by painting the yellow fish on sewers along Lacasse Blvd. with a goal of covering all of Tecumseh in future years.
The town's Public Works department has agreed to help out with the project as well.