MOWEAQUA - Some Moweaqua residents have been seeing a lot of Central A&M High School students, who are very interested in how much water they use.

"We have 300 low-flow shower heads and faucet aerators that were all donated (that) we're going to distribute through Moweaqua and Assumption," said Kolton Minott, a senior who is one of the students involved in the project. "We read meters at 100 houses in Moweaqua to see how much water they used, then we're going to donate low-flow shower heads and faucet aerators and see how much water they save."

Every year, teacher Donna Caplinger does a unit on water in her advanced topics in biology class. This year, she got an e-mail from Scholastic Inc. about the Lexus Eco Challenge, which provides an opportunity for teens to make a difference by creating projects in air, water or land conservation. At practically the same time, she discovered the Water- Smart Innovations Conference would be meeting in Las Vegas in early October. She and a parent raised enough money to take six students to that conference, where they had a chance to hobnob with manufacturers of low-water usage equipment and hear speakers such as Prince Feisel Ibn Al-Hussein of Jordan, who discussed his country's fresh water shortage and what they're doing about it.

While they were there, Minott and the other students asked some of the manufacturers if they would donate equipment to their project and learned of the myriad of new ways for saving water. At their school, maintenance installed new valves in one bathroom that already have saved $500 a month in water bills. Users can pull the handle one way for a half flush to dispose of liquid waste and the other way for a full flush for solid waste.

"We're educating the elementary," Minott said. "We gave a lesson to fifth-graders and taught them about water conservation. We talked to the Audubon Society in Decatur, the Lions Club in Moweaqua and our own school board about water conservation. We've already made a difference somewhat and got the school to start implementing water conservation ideas."

The students call themselves The Water Striders and are working on getting the whole community to pitch in. Moweaqua is served by only three wells for city water, said student Kyle Wiseman, and every bit of conservation that residents can do will make the water last longer into the future.

For the Lexus Eco-Challenge, the students have prepared a PowerPoint presentation to show their efforts. If their team is one of the winners, they have a chance to compete for a national prize of $50,000. Each student would receive a portion of the prize toward college expenses, and the school would receive the rest. The first deadline for entries is Dec. 12.

The students can't install the water-saving devices in residents' homes, but they're easy to install, Minott said. It's just a matter of unscrewing the old shower head and screwing the new one on, and for those who didn't get a donated one, most home improvement stores sell them very inexpensively.

They've also chosen two model homes, where new low-flow toilets and other water conservation devices were installed to save water throughout the house. Minott's home is one of those, and in his family of five, he said, they hope to see a significant savings in water usage with the new equipment.

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