Everyday, I walk down the hallway passing at least five of the seven water bottle fillers in WHS. Since the middle of September, the filter lights have been red. How are we supposed to drink water out of the filter unit when it isn’t good to drink? Being an athlete, I am constantly trying to stay hydrated. Seeing the red light on the filter definitely repels people away from filling their water bottles from the units.

I realized I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. I would talk to people about it, and others were bothered by it as well. But, even though we complained about it, we never told anyone or thought to look up the lights on the filters and what they mean.

After complaining about it for a month and a half, I decided to actually see what the light colors meant. The meanings of the colors on the filter are: green—no attention needed; yellow—new filter needed shortly, the unit is still safe to drink from and water is still being filtered; and red—filter has reached 100 percent of usable life and water is not being filtered. I also researched how much money it would take to get filters replaced. It costs $125 to replace one filter, equaling $875 to replace every filter in the school. Yet, one filter does fill 24,000 16 oz. water bottles up.

Yes, there are people in Africa or different places in the world that don’t have any clean water, but why did we spend a few thousand dollars to get the units, and then not even use them properly? I think we need to have at least the two main units to be replaced when the light indicates to do so.