Six Port Washington sophomores won a state competition in 2026. That part was expected. What nobody anticipated was what came next.
The team’s name is Grassroots 4 Change. All six members attend Paul D. Schreiber High School in Nassau County: Jake Leber, Boden Smith, Rowan Danow, Stella Mei, Jackson Brous, and Jamison Hershman. Their entry point was Destination Imagination, the international student creativity competition, but what they built inside that framework quickly outgrew it. They’re running an environmental awareness campaign now, and they’re targeting the chemicals soaking into their neighbors’ front yards.
Literally.
“We started by asking simple questions about what’s being sprayed on our lawns,” the team said. “When we learned that chemicals like glyphosate, 2,4-D, and atrazine are linked to serious health risks, we knew we had to do something.”
Those aren’t fringe concerns. Glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the United States, has faced years of scientific scrutiny and costly litigation over cancer links. Atrazine doesn’t fare much better: researchers have documented the chemical’s ability to disrupt aquatic ecosystems even when concentrations are low. For Port Washington residents whose properties back up close to Manhasset Bay, the runoff question isn’t theoretical. It’s a storm drain away.
The team didn’t just happen to find each other. Lainie Leber, a parent and former New York City educator who manages Grassroots 4 Change, spent real time putting it together deliberately. She wanted students with different skill sets in the same room: an engineer, a multimedia storyteller, a builder, someone who’d argue a case, a performer. She recruited from memory and instinct, pulling in one student she remembered because of an old story about a girl who’d once built a ladder to climb out of her bedroom wall, another she knew as a standout orator from a middle school mock trial.
“It just kind of evolved,” Leber said. “One person led to another.”
Her philosophy on team structure isn’t subtle. “Life is interdisciplinary,” she said. “You need an artist, an engineer, a writer. No matter what industry you’re in, you need all different people to make something happen. But in high school, there’s no thought about bringing together interdisciplinary teams like that.”
The group meets every Sunday. Destination Imagination gave them a competition to enter and a deadline to hit. But their actual cause came from a different conversation. When the students reached out to North Hempstead Town Council Member Mariann Dalimonte asking what their community most needed attention on, she didn’t hesitate. Toxic lawn chemicals and their effect on local waterways were the answer.
“Our town councilwoman inspired us with her dedication to our local environment and waterways,” said one team member.
That conversation turned research into mission. The students started digging into what 2,4-D, glyphosate, and atrazine actually do once they leave the bottle, what happens when they wash off a lawn in a rainstorm, where they end up, who they affect. “Researching agrochemicals, dirt and runoff doesn’t sound glamorous,” he said. It wasn’t. It worked anyway.
The Long Island Press covered the team’s state win on April 10, 2026. You can read that coverage at Long Island Press. The win validates the effort, but the students aren’t treating a trophy as the finish line. They’re pushing for real changes in how Nassau County communities think about what gets applied to lawns and what washes off them into local water.
Grassroots 4 Change isn’t a school club with a poster and a bake sale. It’s six students who did the homework, won the competition, and didn’t stop there. Port Washington has 343 reasons a year to worry about its budget, but the teenagers at Schreiber High School are making the case that some of the most expensive problems don’t start in a government ledger. They start on a Saturday morning when someone hires a lawn service and nobody asks what’s in the tank.