“Disconnect to reconnect,” junior and president of the new CEI club Sam Bader said. This is the motto for the Continuous Energy Improvement committee, a twenty-member student organization supervised by physics teacher Mr. David Dougherty.

Late last year, former physics teacher Mr. Gregory Collins applied for a grant from PPL, and Southern Lehigh was awarded 50,000 dollars to find ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

“We decided the best course of action was to make a student run club for it,” Bader said.

The purpose of CEI is  to come up with more ways to conserve and improve our energy consumption, so we use energy more effectively.  Mr. Dougherty, who inherited the club when Mr. Collins resigned, seeks to encourage students to both save energy and spend more time “in the here and now.”

“Our high energy usage is a symptom of us always on the go, never being present,” Mr. Dougherty said. “So if you teach people to relax, to enjoy each other and be in the now, you get rid of those symptoms.”

Make no mistake: CEI still seeks to cut down on the school’s energy use, and to also help all of us from using more energy than is needed.

“Right now we’re in the planning stages,” Bader said. “We’re planning on going to field trips in the area, [to schools] who have already used this initiative to become much more energy efficient than us.”

CEI has a few plans in the works, one of which is an assembly to get students more involved, as well as more informed of the club’s existence to hopefully get more students involved.

“[We’re] talking about measuring the daylight in each classroom,” Bader said. “And using the light sensors to balance the inside light and outside light.”

CEI also participated in the Health and Wellness Expo on November 19th.

The club meets every Day 3 during Spartan Period. To join, interested students should talk to Mr.Dougherty to have their Spartan Periods switched.

“None of this is hypothetical. If they want a real world experience, come here,” Mr. Dougherty said. “This is where rubber meets the road, but hopefully it’s recycled rubber.”