Riverside-Brookfield High School parents may have noticed seven new signs on Ridgewood Road and Golf Road declaring the school a “no idling zone.”
The signs were installed April 12 as the result of an initiative from members of the school’s Ecology Club to get parents who are picking up their students at the end of the day to stop idling their cars — or running the engine without driving — while they wait.
To recognize the club’s achievement, Village President Douglas Pollock invited David Monti, an RB science teacher and the Ecology Club’s sponsor, to speak at the Riverside village board meeting Thursday. Monti touched on the club’s 40-year history of restoration work at Wolf Road Prairie and Waubansee Woods before turning the podium over to three of the club’s senior student officers, Desi LaRocque, Maiana Nelson and Hayden Marrs.
“At the beginning of each year in Eco Club, we all just come together, collaborate and find one thing that we see is wrong in the community or we want to change or we want to improve, and we noticed the surplus amount of cars in front of our school that are just sitting there, idling,” LaRocque said.
“It was really cool. We got to present this to our assistant superintendent and our principal and assistant principal to kind of come up with a solution for this,” Nelson said. “Our board offered to fund these signs, and they were up in a couple of weeks, which was really exciting to kind of see all of our work finally be put up.”
“On behalf of the students, we want to thank Mr. Monti and the administration for being so flexible and allowing us to hopefully create a legacy of environmental consciousness in this community,” Marrs said.
How did this initiative come together?
As LaRocque said, each year in the fall, the club’s members choose an ecological project to pursue for the school year. This year, the students decided to focus on fighting the negative effects of idling cars.
“You have people that come at 2:40 to pick up their kid, and they sit out there for 30 minutes, and their car is running,” Monti said in a phone call. “It makes sense when it’s February, and it’s below zero, and you got your heat going, but when it’s not that cold, it’s just such a waste of gasoline and a waste of fuel, and it’s so polluting.”
Monti said the students spent several months working together in teams to research the negative effects of idling cars, which can impact people’s health and finances and the environment. Once they had assembled the facts, the students put together a presentation, including three slides of sources, and invited school administrators to one of the club’s meetings in March.
What persuaded administrators
According to the club’s presentation, which you can view on the school’s website, idling cars produce ozone, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, three gases that are harmful to people’s health. Ozone can decrease lung growth and cause inflammation. Nitrogen oxides can cause dizziness and unconsciousness while carbon monoxide can cause fatigue, headaches and confusion; both kinds of gas can cause death, too.
Cars can consume up to half a gallon of gasoline each hour they’re left idling, which can require drivers to buy gas more often. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, idling a vehicle for 15 minutes a day will consume nearly 30 gallons of fuel each year. Idling can also damage a car’s engine, leading car owners to pay to replace parts.
Idling also has a negative effect on the environment. According to the United States Department of Energy, idling cars release 30 million tons of carbon dioxide each year in the U.S. Idling cars also play a major role in producing greenhouse gases and contributing to the hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere.
The administrators who attended the meeting — Assistant Superintendent Kristin Smetana, Principal Héctor Freytas, Assistant Principal for Student Affairs David Mannon and Director of Custodial Services Burim Grajcevci — were immediately impressed with the students’ efforts, Monti said.
“The four of them came, and the kids presented it … I maybe jumped in to clarify something,” he said. “The kids did a fantastic job.”
Monti said the club had been prepared to pay for the signs using funds the students had raised over time but that there was no need.
“We had offered we would pay for the signs, and then Ms. Smetana said, ‘No, this is a district thing. This is important, and the signs aren’t very expensive,’ and she said the district would cover the signs, and so we were all kinda like, ‘Whoa, OK, so that’s kinda cool,’” he said.
While Superintendent Kevin Skinkis was out of the school on the day of the meeting and could not attend, the other administrators brought it back to him, and he approved the signs, Monti said.
Then, Ecology Club students reached out to Brookfield and Riverside about installing the signs, as the villages, rather than the school, own the land the signs were placed on. From there, the process went smoothly.
“We ordered the signs once the village OK’d it, and the village said they would install them, so we ordered the signs right before spring break,” Monti said.
He added that the seven signs arrived earlier this month. Riverside Public Works Director Dan Tabb installed them April 12, according to the school.
While the club was coordinating with the villages, Monti said he learned the Brookfield conservation commission had been looking into adding “no idling” signs. The addition of anti-idling policies near schools and transit stations is one of the actions within Brookfield’s sustainability plan, which the conservation commission wrote. Brookfield’s village board adopted the sustainability plan earlier this month.
Even with the installation of the seven signs along student pickup and drop-off areas, Monti said the Ecology Club isn’t done yet. He said the club has plans to put up another set of signs in the student parking lot with different wording, as club members realized their peers were idling their cars in the morning after parking.
“The kids said kids will sit in their cars if they get to school early,” he said. “They will sit in their cars and talk and be on their phone, and their car’s idling. I didn’t realize that kids would do that.”
The club is also looking into getting even more signs put up in the faculty parking lot, which some parents will pull into to avoid traffic and idle their cars as they wait to pick up their children; however, Monti said the parking lot’s land belongs to Brookfield Zoo Chicago, so the club is waiting to hear back after reaching out to the zoo earlier this week.
Monti said his students in the Ecology Club were excited about how RB administration agreed to the initiative quickly and without asking them to make any changes.
“We were waiting for a little pushback or a little resistance or, like, ‘Oh, you need to fix this or fix this,’” he said. “So, for them to have approved it, and then for them to have said, ‘No, no, we’ll fund it’ … We’re very grateful, very thankful.”
