Kids make a difference! - A Pledge and a Promise Environmental Award won by students from the Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonio, TX who worked to clean up graffiti; includes projects by other finalists

Ranger Rick, Dec, 1995

Every year a dozen kids' groups from around the U.S. are chosen as finalists for an environmental prize. The prize, offered by the Anheuser Busch company, is called A Pledge and a Promise Environmental Award. Kids from kindergarten through college can enter.

Winners are picked by five organizations, including the National Wildlife Federation. (That's who puts out your Ranger Rick magazine.)

This year the winning group was from the Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. The winning students call themselves the Graffiti Grapplers. They've been working hard turning parts of their city into cleaner, friendlier environments (see photo below). The kids have cleaned up hundreds of messy messages scrawled on buildings and walls. They've also picked up loads of litter and planted lots of trees and wildflowers.

Here are some neat things other finalist groups are doing:

* At Wakeland Elementary School in Bradenton, Florida, kids have a project to help spread plants that grow naturally in their area. And they got the whole community involved in helping out.

* In Pahala, Hawaii, kids from the Pahala Elementary School work with high school students and a home for the elderly. Together, the old people and the students made creative gardens and began recycling projects.

Three cheers for all these enviro kids! If you belong to a kids' environmental group that does neat stuff, you can enter this contest too. Act quickly--the deadline is January 31. For an application form, write to:

Educational Outreach

Dept. PP

National Wildlife Federation

8925 Leesburg Pike

Vienna, VA 22184