Recently, Greater Latrobe sophomore Lily Ridilla was recognized as top scoring student for her Environmental Prose project for the Fairchild Challenge. The Fairchild Challenge is a challenge held by the Phipps Conservatory, and they offer a series of challenges to a bunch of different schools that you can do involving community, environment, and landscaping, and then you submit those every month, and they’ll score you based off your own criteria.

“As soon as Lily saw it was available, she came to me and asked if I would sponsor her.” Seventh-grade science teacher Mr. Roberts recalls. “I immediately looked it up and agreed.” Lily won the Environmental Prose project, which is where she had to write a story in the style of Ernest Hemingway, who had very short and concise writing. She had to write in different perspectives about the environment. Lily also participated in a few other challenges.

“I actually started late on the first project,” Lily remembers. “I didn’t even know about the challenge until mid-October, and the challenge started in September, so I actually missed a project. For the second project I was picking an area in the community and designing an environmental space for the community and I also had to research environmental issues that it could help, and with that, I had to design a pollen garden for colonies because that was a big issue in Latrobe.”

For some of the other assignments, Lily had to document the cities own environmental efforts. To help with that, Mr. Roberts had Lily in the Environmental Club, and a new club this year called the Green Team. He also helped by putting her in contact with a few people that could help her with this.

With all of Lily’s hard work and of course her win with her Environmental Prose project, Greater Latrobe Senior High School was recognized as Rookie School of the Year. That means that since this is the first year Latrobe has done it, it was our highest score so far. “It was really interesting to learn about environmental laws in PA and what our community needs in terms of that aspect,” Lily says. “It’s been the career choice of my dream since I was very young so this was a really good opportunity to see what it’s about and so far I’ve really enjoyed it.”