Five students from Newberry High School who have been encouraging their school and community to ‘go green’ will now be taking home a different kind of green.

Dakota Herrera, Ashley Hughes, Anna Thrasher, Crystal Hall and Joyce Heckerman have won first place in the Lexus Environmental Challenge Contest, a national competition sponsored by Toyota. As members of one of only 14 first-place teams in the nation, the girls will share a $35,000 first place cash award, with another $10,000 going to their school and five thousand to their advisor, science teacher Cynthia Holland.

“I am thrilled for the girls,” said Holland. “They’ve worked so hard and they’ve shown that students really can make a difference.”

The girls have spent the entire school year both during and outside of school on a variety of projects aimed at promoting conservation among their fellow students and citizens throughout their area. The girls started a bottle recycling project in their school, gave out reusable ‘green’ shopping bags at area grocery stories, created public service announcements for the local public access channel, organized tree planting activities and initiated a host of other projects in and around Newberry. They say they’ve been gratified by the response from the community.

“People are bringing in their plastic bottles, they’re getting involved now, we’re definitely getting good reactions,” said Hughes.  “I’m so happy with what we’ve done.”

“I get such a great feeling knowing that people really want to save the earth,” said Herrera. “It’s really important to me.”

The girls’ strong performance in the preliminary stages of the competition had already earned them each $1000 in scholarships. But they say the work they’ve been doing meant much more to them than awards or scholarships.

“We weren’t doing it for the money,” said Hall. “We were doing it for the environmental impact, to get everyone to live a more green life.”

“We wanted to inform people about what they can do to help,” said Heckerman. “We only have one earth—if we lose this one, there’s nowhere to go.”

In fact, the girls have several more projects planned for the next few months, including presentations at the local library and a joint project with Waste Management.

“Even though the contest is over, we still want to continue helping the environment,” said Thrasher. “I’m really glad people are becoming more aware and are doing things to help the environment.”

“It isn’t over for them at all,” said Holland.  “They’re so excited about doing these next projects even though they won’t get any recognition for them because they know they’re making a difference.”