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Miami Palmetto High School senior Lacey Buchwald was a member of the Agents of Change team that won the Aspen Challenge last year. The prizes included $2,500 in scholarship funds, an Apple computer and headphones.
“Three schools in Miami won,” she says. “The Agents of Change focuses on climate change and greenhouse gas emission.”
Her role on the team included being a host on the Let’s Be Green podcast. The challenge began in 2020 but was postponed and re-started in 2021 because of COVID.
“We talked about the science behind climate change and we interviewed three people who have been there on climate change in Miami.”
While the challenge ended last year, some aspects are continuing.
“We are doing composting and Meatless Mondays,” she says.
The project was well received. Buchwald says they received a lot of good feedback including from the Palmetto faculty.
“Even the school board, when we had the ceremony where they gave us our prizes,” she says. “They were happy with what we are doing.”
Buchwald is vice president of Model United Nations. She’s been doing Model UN competitions since freshman year and won second place in the press corps outstanding delegate category at the Gator MUM.
“I think Model UN is one of those things I really love,” she says. “It has helped me determine what I want to do in the future.”
She’s the upperclassman treasurer for Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) and she’s a member of the student cabinet for the Class of ’22.
Buchwald is in the Science National Honor Society and a member of the school’s Climate Leadership Information Project (CLIP). She is a certified climate speaker for The CLEO Institute, which sponsors CLIP.
“It’s like HIP, but we would go around to different classrooms and give presentations to biology classes, mostly ninth and 10 graders,” she says. “They’d brief us on the presentation and then we’d present it to the students. Then we’d get surveys on our performance.”
They did pre and post surveys to assess what the students learned.
By the end of last year Buchwald had done three or four teaching sessions over Zoom. She approached teachers to get their consent to do the presentations.
“I think we might do some in the second half of this school year because that’s when we did them last year,” she says.
Buchwald has participated in Envirothon. Although she was placed on an alternate team, the team won the Forestry award. Last school year they won the Special Topic Award at the regional competition. She plans to participate again this year.
She’s a member of the Social Studies National Honor Society and participated in History Bowl before COVID-19 restrictions. She’s participated in one competition so far this year.
Over the holidays, she finalized applications to Columbia University, Vanderbilt, Boston University, the University of Michigan and Georgetown. She’s already been accepted to the University of Central Florida and Florida International University.
She applied early action to the University of Miami and is a semi-finalist for the Stamps Scholarship.
Her focus is on law and political science on a law school track.
Before COVID, Buchwald would tutor the children of a Syrian family.
“There were some seniors I would go with, and we would go to the house of a Syrian refugee family, and I would do homework with the kids,” she says. “I haven’t been able to talk to them as much through COVID but I was able to help them over Zoom. That is something I enjoyed very much.”
She is still talking to the family.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
