It was hot at CHS, just like any other day. The sun was burning all the cross-country kids on the track, the children of the volleyball team were dying from heat in the gym, and Carson Paul, a CHS sophomore, was running around the school searching for a nice drink of water. Paul ran to the office hoping for a nice bottle of Dasani water, but when he asked for a bottle he was told to go to the water fountains. After about 10 minutes of contemplation in front of the nearest ominous looking fountain, he decided to take a sip, and to his surprise he was not drinking water, he was drinking liquified trash. Any other unfortunate soul that has forgotten to bring a water bottle to CHS has probably come across this situation once or twice. Seeing this leads to the question, why are CHS water fountains so abominably awful, odious, vile and disgusting?
It’s baffling to think that the students of CHS struggle with this disgusting water while any plant in Claremont is graciously guzzling S tier liquid gold; hence, the greenery in Claremont. Claremont is known to be the city of trees, but no one really pays attention to how Claremont gets their green trees and what sacrifices they make to get them. When interviewing Paul and conducting some tests, it seemed that there is obviously a favorite organism when evaluating the CHS water supply.
“The water fountains are absolutely disgusting, the equivalent of dirt water!” Paul said. “Sad to say it made me throw up afterwards. I’m being honest to god. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve drunk the sprinkler water instead of the fountains and it’s surprisingly much better.”

To test whether or not Carson was correct in his assertions or if the contaminated drinking fountain water has just affected his brain, I decided to perform a scientific experiment. To do this testing of the water quality, it had to be done by a test that never fails …transparency. Once both waters, sprinkler and fountain, were examined, there was a clear winner and unfortunately it did not fall in the human’s favor.
The sprinkler water was much clearer than the water from the fountains, but to make sure there was no deniability, I took a sip. While they were both disgusting straight off the bat, when it came down to it the fountain water tasted worse.
When in the middle of a drought, it seems that Claremont still values their plants over their students. Living in harsh conditions is hard for students at CHS and changes need to be made to improve students’ quality of life. Three years ago, El Roble put in a water bottle filler with semi filtered water in one of their fountains. These are useful not only for the cleanliness but also just the taste. Hopefully CHS will move to this soon due to the fact that the students need drinkable water. CHS chooses to value plants over students and this needs to change. Humans need to become the favorite organisms at last. CHS students must step on any plants that block the path to water equality.