The program has established a network of around twenty schools (displayed in green on the map below) throughout Israel with students from varying cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds, including the communities of Haifa, Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, Gedera, Daliat El Carmel, Shfaram, Kfar Manda, Kibbutz Evron, Kfar Silver, Netivot, and Lod.

A growing number of in-country and international Rotary Clubs, along with other partnering organizations, have supported and are committed to expand upon RHAW’s initial programming phase, with the goal of building cross-cultural ties through the students’ shared experience of water conservation and environmental stewardship, serving to break down communication barriers and mistrust amongst the disparate youth and eventually leading to peaceful cooperation.

Numerous schools have been identified as future partners (displayed in blue on the map below) and RHAW hope to engage them in its next rounds of programming. The leadership of each school has been vetted, approached, and has shown great interest in joining the cross-cultural network.

Map Notes:

• Click on the pins for more detail on each school.
• Click the box at the top left for a list of schools.
• Click the box at the top right to view map in fullscreen.

The plan for Phase II was to provide 20 or more schools with required teaching content and teacher’s training, support equipment and cross-cultural collaboration opportunities through research, field trips to water facilities such as a desalination plant, reclamation sites and to selected water technology plants. Such as Bermad to see production and use of pressure valves. Twenty-four (24) Teacher’s Training meetings were held during Phase II. Peace Building through research, field trips and conferences remained a key emphasis in the education process with the annual RHAW graduation became a lucrative cross-cultural science education event .

Education

New schools continued to join the program school network and almost tripled the original plan (the plan was 10 new and 10 old schools), totaling 54 graduating schools. These were out of 65 that started and partly participated during the year. The education/research program was built on a broad multidisciplinary water & sanitation approach using STEAM (Science, technology, Engineering, Art, Math). Topics for research projects included water treatment and industrial wastewater collection, reuse on seasonal storage, special (purple) supply and dripper systems, and the impact of reclaimed wastewater on irrigation of kitchen gardens and on soil. Other topics included dripper irrigators, waste water treatment, the sea-land interface, energy efficient modern pumps, advanced leakage prevention technology, and advanced agriculture methods, I.e., pressure compensated drippers, and growth monitoring systems. The 2017-18 school year concluded with 34 research projects, the 2018-19 school year 60 research projects. New subjects were addressed covering all aspects of water & sanitation like reclaimed water treatment, it’s potential long-term hazards and possible remedies, reservoir evaporation protection, water pumping basics from pump functionality to energy consumption. Advanced agriculture projects included greenhouses, dripper irrigation, aquaponics, remote irrigation sensing, close and precise monitoring of irrigation (soil humidity) and actual hourly growth assessment.

The Arab School of Shaeb stood out for its work on models of ancient and new pumps using Lego to build complete models of wastewater reclamation plant, and an automatic water quality monitoring system. A grey water filtration , using recycled dialysis filters, was done by A-Tur east Jerusalem girls’ middle school. Shaeb and Carmiel schools worked jointly on greenhouse and aquaponics projects and visited a desalination plant. Two schools from the Sharon region (Hadera and Kfar Kasem, both newcomers ) toured water related sites. The Metzer Kibbutz and Maiser the neighbor Arab village worked on water projects together. In addition to two schools with diverse student grouping, multi school events, exhibitions, graduations and Watec conferences allowed for broad based cross cultural interaction and were well received