For 40 years, Dallas has sponsored a water conservation art contest for the city’s children.
It has evolved from a poster contest solely for grade schoolers to include posters, T-shirt design and visual arts, all for middle through high school students.
As a local and regional provider of water, wastewater and stormwater management and flood control, Dallas Water Utilities serves a population of more than 2.6 million. The wastewater division operates two treatment plants that process some 260 mgd while caring for more than 4,000 miles of sanitary sewers.
Reaching all ages
The utilities’ outreach team members promote the contest through newspaper ads, public service announcements and emails direct to the students who have taken part in previous years. They also reach out to art and science teachers whose students have entered before.
“The overarching message is water conservation, but we change the theme up every year to inspire the children,” says Alicia Lee, water conservation manager. This year’s theme was “True Blue, Water Conservation Art Contest, 40th.” The number 40 had to appear somewhere in the artwork. There are three age categories:
- Grades 1-5: Poster contest
- Grades 6-8: T-shirt design competition
- Grades 9-12: Digital and visual arts, including photography, photoshop, tablet art and videos
Students have from late February until the first week in April to submit their entries. Public and private school and home-schooled students are eligible. The winners are announced in the first week in May, during National Drinking Water Week.
Picking winners
“The goal is and always has been to reach students with a big campaign to get them, and ultimately their parents, to recognize the importance of water in their lives,” Lee says.
The submissions are judged on creativity, originality and artistic merit. The city established the Environmental Education Initiative in 2006 to collaborate with teachers on curricula for water conservation. Four staff members of the EEI, which is administered through the University of North Texas, judge the entries, along with a judge who usually comes from the U.S. EPA Region 6 office.
For high school students, EEI provides 10 to 12 high school juniors and seniors with paid internships that involve water conservation research. The university administers the program.
Art contest entries are judged in early April and are posted on savedallaswater.com at the end of that month. First, second and third place winners are chosen for each age group. Before the COVID pandemic, the city received about 700 entries per year. Since then, submissions have fallen to about 200, but that is starting to ramp up as the competition rebuilds momentum year by year, says Lee.
Rewards and recognition
All winners’ classrooms get a pizza party, and winners’ teachers receive vouchers for art supplies. Student winners get Chromebooks, earbuds, Crayola Inspiration art cases and pen tablets. A reception for the winners, family and friends is held in the first week of May at City Hall.
The winning posters are mounted on foam board and displayed along with the digital and visual art winners. The top T-shirt designs are printed on shirts, which are handed out to all those present at the reception.
Images of winning posters are also printed on backpacks, tote bags, tumblers and swag bags, and winning students and their teachers receive certificates. Group photos are taken at the event and distributed to students and educators.
Students, teachers and staff wear the T-shirts on casual Friday, further promoting the winners and the contest. First-place-winning posters from the past 40 years are mounted on a Wall of Fame at the Water Conservation office in City Hall.
Lee comments on the program’s long legacy: “The mother of one of our first-place winners told us she had won when she was a student. You know the contest has come full circle when current generations win awards their parents have also won.”
