Press Release: #NJSTEMTOGETHER

Hoboken High School participate in the #NJSTEMTogether Communities Challenge
Hoboken, NJ, March 29, 2021 — Hoboken High School’s Environmental Science Club participated in the South Jersey STEM Innovation & Partnership’s #NJSTEMTogether Communities Challenge. The #NJSTEMTogether Communities Challenge is an annual challenge for New Jersey high school students to come together and design a solution for a problem that their community is facing. High school students come together to solve the challenges faced by their community. The final presentation will be a virtual event to gather all the participants online and students will present their solution to a problem. The students will have to identify the issues that their communities are facing today and how they would like to address the issue. Hoboken High School has a team of three students: Sheila Lam, Daniel Weintraub and Rowan Ellison. This team is participating with a Final Presentation that answers the question: What can the student community do to build a resilient community in response to the current pandemic? The triad has created a detailed four-pronged plan focusing on helping Hoboken’s small businesses. The first involves securing state and federal funding, the second involves utilizing STEM technologies to help Hoboken’s small businesses safely welcome more customers, the third involves a public information campaign and the fourth involves implementation and deployment of their plan in partnership with local entities within Hoboken. As part of their extensive research, the team took a detailed account of closed businesses in Hoboken by taking photos of closed store fronts, contacted local and state level government officials by phone and by email, attended STEMinars, researched and collected data on everything from state and local budgets as well to how to kill COVID using UV light and HEPA filtration to how to incorporate improved airflow to decrease transmission of the virus into their solution. The students also consulted with mentors from local corporations including BD, Comcast, Siemens and others to further develop their solution. The team has created a working website to connect with Hoboken's businesses as well as a working algorithm to test the effectiveness of their solution. The Hoboken HS team placed 4th out of 20 State Finalists and over 100 participants across the State of New Jersey. The Hoboken HS team is advised by Mr. Jean Lebegue .