New Scholarship For High School Students Goes Green

By Eliza Hallabeck

A new scholarship was added to the list for Newtown students to apply for. The Gift of Green scholarship was sponsored by Jeff and Brenda Wurtz.

Brenda Wurtz, at the Brenda Wurtz Retail Real Estate Group, said she and her husband, Jeff Wurtz, wanted to something for the schools.

The scholarship has an application, and it is open to all students. Ms Wurtz said the J&B Scholarship Committee, which was put together to give out the scholarship, does not look at academic achievement, but they do look at the application and essay that the students hand in.

It will award two students, a boy and a girl, each year with $1,500, which will be divided into two separate disbursements. The first $750 goes directly to the institution providing the higher education, and the second half goes directly to the recipient.

The description for the scholarship explained what it wanted to the students to be able to do: “This $1,500 scholarship will be awarded to the individual who can best demonstrate through the required written essay their ideas for way to affect the concept of going green as it applies to practices and programs that businesses, small and large, can implement to reduce pollution in their business environment.”

This past year was the first year that the scholarship was awarded, and the two students who received the it are Christopher Fragoso and Rachel K. Rockwell. Christopher will be attending Wesleyan University this fall, and Rachel was not yet decided on which school she will be attending in the fall at the time the application for the scholarship was filled out. Christopher plans to study environment science.

“We all got such positive feelings from both of them,” said Ms Wurtz about the two winning applicants. She said when the J&B Scholarship Committee was interviewing them, they were impressed. Both Christopher and Rachel plan to go into fields that will be working with environmental issues.

“We can all do more,” Ms Wurtz added.

She and her husband came up with the idea for the scholarship because they believe that educating students from the high school down can help to make a difference.

“My husband and I are conscious of the environment,” said Ms Wurtz during a phone interview this Wednesday.

In Christopher’s essay for the scholarship, he wrote that the excessive use of paper and plastic by businesses is wasteful.

“Despite claims of environmentalism being antibusiness, one principle connects these two societal conflicts,” Christopher wrote in the opening of his essay. “The common link is the efficient use of resources.”

Christopher went on to describe the harm the excess plastic and paper has on the environment and on the business. It is a costly process to have to replace the materials that are being wasted by overuse, he explained. He concluded, “Wasteful business practices will not survive and neither will the environment. A reasonable way for our economy to begin the transaction to a less wasteful system is by reducing the unnecessary and excessive use of paper and plastic.”

In Rachel’s essay she focused on what companies have done already to cut back costs, and improve consumer sales. She used the example of the new Snapple bottles to prove her point, “With their new ‘30 percent less plastic’ reshaped bottles, these water bottle companies not only save on cost of plastic, but also gain that ‘green’ label, boosting public opinion, public acceptance and sales,” she wrote.

“We’re just doing out part,” said Ms Wurtz, about the scholarship.