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Miami Palmetto High School senior Logan Shapiro is Palmetto’s Silver Knight nominee in Athletics. He’s an outfielder and intends to play baseball in college. This is a transition year for the team with the arrival of a new coach. Shapiro’s enthusiastic about the possibilities.
“I think we’re going to be good,” he says.
He’s also excited about the opportunity to play against teams from Texas and Georgia that will be flying in to play Palmetto this season.
His passion outside of baseball is a community service project called Turtle Team.
“We founded it in 2020 during the pandemic,” he says. “We started it as a way to issue community service hours. We’ve issued over 10,000 community service hours and picked up over 15,000 pounds of trash.”
Turtle Team is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
He is one of the four original founders. One founder graduated and moved on to Florida State University. The other two are still at Palmetto as well.
“We have a significant social media presence,” he says. “We have ambassadors across all the high schools in Miami. They spread the information about when events will occur. They spread the word within their school.”
They also have ambassadors in five different states.
Turtle Team uses Instagram and Snapchat to spread information on social media.
Turtle Team hosts clean-ups the last Saturday of the month, usually at Black Point Marina.
“We partner with Miami-Dade Parks,” he says. “Occasionally we will have clean ups at Crandon Park and Matheson Hammock Park. Aside from clean-ups, we actually work with the Florida Department of Environment Protection. We assist them in building protection for sea turtle nests.”
The teens purchase and donate the stakes and tapes that surround the nest.
“And we’ll put a sign that it is a nest with the Turtle Team Logo on it,” he says.
Occasionally they get lucky enough to watch the turtles hatch and guide them to the water.
“It’s a crazy experience,” he says.
They can’t always calculate when the eggs will hatch.
The non-profit has partnered with Eco Artist Xavier Cortada on the Signs of Civility project.
“We repurposed political signs and wrote positive messages with him and reposted them around the community, once at Pinecrest Gardens and Pinecrest Elementary,” he says.
“While we were at Pinecrest Elementary we had education stations to educate kids on the sea turtle nests and on how to keep their eyes out for them.”
The teens also partner with the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station.
“We assist them with wildlife rehabilitation. We will transport them to the station to receive care and then release them to the wild,” he says. “We reached out asking if we could go on a tour. And it developed into a pretty good connection.”
Shapiro says they make donations to the Marathon Turtle Hospital as well as Pelican Harbor.
“We sell tee shirts,” he says. “We try to raise money through merchandise sales, and we accept donations as well. All the money ends up going to the turtle hospital or the seabird station.”
At Palmetto, he is a member of the Social Science Honor Society. This year he is participating in the History Bowl through the honor society.
He’s also a member of the Jewish Student Union.
In college, Shapiro plans to major in either mechanical engineering or marine science. He’s applied to the Coast Guard Academy, the Florida universities, and Rice in Texas.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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