Should students be drinking from the water fountains?

By Heyli G.

Do you know what’s lurking in the school’s water fountains?

Well, students in Ms. Suarez’s Nanotechnology class took a hard look at the quality of the school’s water for one of their class experiments.

“My intention was to have students learn how to use a water testing kit,” Ms. Suarez said.

She explained that she wanted students to learn how to read directions and figure out how to follow through on an experiment, similar to how we take COVID tests.

She added, “So that was one aspect and the other part was also just be able to test and see what is in the drinking water at school because it seemed to be a point of interest, and I thought that it would be interesting and fun for students to learn more about the water at school.”

Ms. Suarez shared that her class was having a discussion about water pollution and thought about making a kind of nanotechnology that can solve some water pollution problems in the world.

Jess J., a 12th grader, said, “Yeah, I shared that idea because back in middle school, the water didn’t look drinkable. It was a brown reddish color and my friend drank out of it and he got sick the very next day.”

Ms. Suarez said “So then I was like, wait, maybe we should take a tangent and just see what comes out of this. So I kind of put everything else on pause and just went with that idea and then ended up doing it for the two classes.”

She liked how the experiment was student-driven because she liked getting ideas from students.

Elizabeth C., an 11th grader, shared that she and her group tested the water fountains on the first floor of the CATS building, the one near the weight room and the one near the cafeteria.

She said, “I learned that the school’s drinking water fountain quality is not safe for students to drink and we found that a lot of contaminants were in the water fountain.”

Elizabeth added that it could lead to health problems in the future.

Elizabeth shared that she liked doing the experiment because she was able to learn new things about the water fountains that she didn’t know previously from this experiment.

She added, “I think the school should do a better job at providing water for people at the school because many people don’t have access to water resources at their house.”

Ms. Suarez wants to thank all of the students for participating in the experiment and said that she’s looking forward to seeing the results.

She said, “It looks like the water hardness at our school is really really crazy on the third floor.”