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2023-24 YES Team Projects
Harbor City International YES Team
The Harbor City International YES Team current projects include educating other students about recycling, working with their local Clean and Safe Team and other neighboring schools to clean up the streets in downtown Duluth, planting trees with Tree-Plenish, and developing a workshop with People of the Estuary about Rights of Nature and water protection. This YES Team is also investigating the Adopt-a-Drain program that would allow them to educate and partner with local businesses to keep storm drains in the city clean. They also hope to create a directory of businesses, highlighting their efforts to be more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
MACCRAY YES Team
In the 2023-24 season, the MACCRAY YES Team will be working with Tree-Plenish to calculate their school’s paper usage, emissions and plant trees to offset their impact. These students are also interested in expanding their recycling program into the elementary school by educating the younger students on its importance and teaching how they can recycle right at school! Along with these projects, the MACCRAY YES Team has been creating in-roads to help build an outdoor classroom at their high school.
Mankato East YES Team
The Mankato East YES Team is working on furthering their school’s recycling education. These students have been researching storm water drainage both at their school and in their local neighborhood – attempting to understand how drainage impacts water quality in their community. As well as water quality, this YES Team is also interested in making improvements to their school’s forested area with the potential possibility of adding prairie restoration and/or a pollinator garden to their school grounds.
Mankato West YES Team
Along with hosting monthly campus clean-ups in which partnerships are built with other school clubs, the Mankato West YES Team has participated in several meetings and informational sessions about the potential for introducing electric buses or other eco-friendly alternatives to diesel buses.
New London-Spicer Middle School YES Team
The NLS YES team is a young team consisting of 7th and 8th graders. These students are highly involved in other activities including knowledge bowl, speech and a number of different sports. They meet on Tuesday mornings in place of their scheduled homeroom hour. This allows them to all stay involved in their other after school activities. The NLS team is interested in prairie and pond based projects, but find the greatest satisfaction in doing projects that help to educate elementary students. This includes creating seed bombs with the NLS 5th graders and a proposed YES day during which they plan to visit elementary classrooms and talk to students about the environment and the things that they can do to make a positive impact. A number of these students have also expressed interest in participating in the Kandiyohi County AIS research project with YES during the summer of 2024.
Royalton High School YES Team
Royalton High School YES Team has been in action this year by continuing their work on their prairie restoration including creating signs for this project, removing invasive species, building bird houses, teaching kindergartners about prairies, enovating outdoor classroom, and visiting Camp Ripley water treatment center and learning about microbial scrubbing.
Sleepy Eye YES Team
“ReCycle Your Holidays” – Sleepy Eye YES Team is collecting broken and worn out Christmas lights – now with 8 total drop sites.
Watertown-Mayer Middle School YES Team
Their YES Team projects include collecting and recycling Christmas lights, visiting the local recycling center, working to implement pen, marker and crayon recycling program.
Westbrook Walnut Grove YES Team
WWG YES Team porjects include: county hospice garage sale clean up, plastic bag collection, recycled artwork and future hopes of making a bench out of the plastic.
Willmar Community Ed. YES Team