Turning Off The Lights

When I read in the Ridgewood Patch about how the RHS Students for Environmental Action Club was saving the taxpayers thousands of dollars, I had one of those, "Why didn't we do this when I was young?" moments. Their idea is a simple one, but takes perseverance and good record keeping. Every Friday afternoon as soon as school is over they split up in teams and turn out all the lights in all the classrooms.

According to Victoria Pan, a junior at Ridgewood High School and the co-president of Students for Environmental Action (SEA), an RHS club,

"Turn Off the Lights is a project in which our club turns off all the classroom lights at the end of the week. Every Friday after school, we basically “raid” the school, turning off all the light switches in the classrooms.

We measure our progress by keeping track of all the lights in our school and using charts to monitor their on/off status. At the end of each raid, I compile the results from the students. We continuously examine the monthly electricity bills every few months or so to check for reductions in energy costs. I’ve been consistently running this project every week for more than a year, and so far, it has saved the school thousands of dollars in electricity costs!"

What a brilliant idea! (pun intended).

Van Neste Park

This photo is used with the permission of Sam Fran Scavuzzo. He is editor of The Ridgewood Patch.

The Patch.org Foundation was formed in March, 2010 to improve the quality of life in underserved communities across the globe through access to trusted local news and information.

The above photo contains the names of the stewards in the Village of Ridgewood who banded together in the early 1990s to renovate Van Neste Park. To say they helped restore it to its previous glory would be to do them a disservice, because they made lasting contributions to the overall beauty of the park so that generations to come would be able to continue to enjoy its simple pleasures. What's more, they accepted contributions from the community and in turn used the money so that visitors would long remember who were the benefactors of the park.

The Van Neste Park renovation was the sort of civic project which are harder than ever today to organize and carry out with the aplomb these folks did. It didn't surprise me at all when I first saw their completed efforts because the committee contained members who had watched over me during all the years I lived in Ridgewood. People like Marion Barnett, Jack Bennett, and Bill Kuipers were my neighbors and they and their spouses were the sort of folks who took pride in the idea that we all have civic responsibilities as residents of a town like Ridgewood. The Van Neste Park project was easily their best work and I'm glad they weren't too modest to have their names engraved on a commemorative stone placed centrally in the park. The stone is a simple reminder of the social forces which bind us together as a community, and what better place than in the tranquil setting of Van Neste Park.