Imagine showing up every Friday to teach a class of middle schoolers that environmental change starts with them. Imagine winning Tacoma’s City of Destiny Award for that effort. Imagine building it into a project so compelling that it places first on a statewide field of 93 teams. Imagine each of the five members of your team accepting a check for $5,000, plus one for your school.

Imagine doing all of that before you’ve graduated from high school.

Five Tacoma School of the Arts students wrapped up that run last weekend when they won the grand prize at Washington State University’s Imagine Tomorrow competition.

Won is the wrong word. It implies luck, not work.

SOTA seniors Isaac Solverson, Logan Jones, MacGregor Tadie and Jake Stortini, and junior Joe Holcomb earned that prize with more than a year of work on “Change Starts Now.”

The idea was to teach younger kids about the possibilities of living a green life – a person, a city, a country at a time – and to make it interesting enough that the students would choose that path.

The SOTA five had come up with the basics of the plan and given it a test run before last year’s Imagine Tomorrow competition. Inspired to do more, they met through last summer to draw up the course’s 24 lesson plans.

“A few hours here, a few hours there,” said Stortini.

They developed their drive, vision, artistic and technical skills into the course they would teach every Friday at Mason Middle School.

Through that process, they were wise enough to respect each other’s strengths and ideas, and to build on them.

“It’s good to disagree,” said Stortini.

How many adults have that level of maturity?

They refined their material with their adviser, Cyrus Brown, and Mason Middle School teacher Brent Beckstead.

During the first semester, the SOTA students taught kids in first and second period classes, and focused on consumerism, climate change and alternative energy.

They had the good sense to realize that the time was taking away from their other studies, and that they were giving their students information, and nothing to do with it.

They dropped their second Mason class, and retooled the rest of the curriculum.

“We came up with a project to incorporate what they’d learned,” said Tadie.

“Designing a green city,” said Stortini. “We gave them different countries, Nigeria, Denmark, Iceland and Brazil.”

“Each of them has an energy source,” Holcomb said. “Iceland has geothermal; Brazil has sugar cane; Nigeria has the sun, and Denmark has wind.”

There was one hitch: The students could use only existing technologies. Cities got bike stations instead of rocket backpack refueling stops.

The younger students flirted with building monorails and banning cars. They researched windmills. They debated mandating a vegetarian city, and the role of government control.

You can visit the class Web site and read their discussions to get a sense of the depth and sophistication of their work. Log on to: classrooms.tacoma.k12.wa.us/sota/imagine

By year’s end, the middle schoolers had harnessed virtual energy, food and water, set up transportation systems and designed buildings. They built models, and explained their work in research papers.

And they changed their own behaviors.

One girl is riding her bike more, said Stortini. Others are recycling, now that they understand why they’re doing it. They’re cutting back on what they’re buying

“They were excited about what we were teaching,” Stortini said. “We’re a lot closer to them in age. They really looked up to us.”

“That’s why we call it an environmentorship program,” Tadie said.

Feel free to groan.

“It’s kind of cheesy,” Tadie admitted.

But it’s true, said Holcomb. “That’s the way we teach it.”

Like the imaginary cities, the SOTA team has built their project to be sustainable.

“We actually have a whole curriculum now,” Holcomb said. “Our goal is to get it to be a sustainable project for this school.”

Next school year, he, Elizabeth Burns, Elisa Dawson, Molly Deutsch and Esther Thompson will teach the class.

Imagine that.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677

kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com