This past January, Walt Whitman High School installed brand-new water fountains complete with a water bottle filling station. Meanwhile, roughly half of our water fountains actually work. The other half, however, are a different story:

Yikes.

Installing new fountains and refill stations would provide numerous benefits for both students and staff at Watkins Mill. With the fountains that the school currently has, refilling bottles is a pain – why take the time to hold your bottle at an awkward angle when you could have an extremely convenient and time-efficient refill station? Installing these would also encourage students to reuse their plastic bottles rather than throw them away after finishing it.

We’re not asking for an instant change, but fixing the fountains that have been “out of order” (for FAR too long) is a good start. If schools like Whitman can live in luxury with their bottle refilling stations, we can at least have working fountains that produce water that – at the very least – looks drinkable.