Written by: Kaia Szulewski ’19

This year, our own Freshman Academy class has had an early start to their expo project. For those of you who don’t know, the Skills 21 Innovation Expo Fest is a yearly competition between the schools of Connecticut. Teams find an issue they feel they can create an innovative solution for, and support those ideas with a generous amount of research.

Students create websites, apps, and even post Vlogs on Youtube in order the show their creativity in the technology field, which ultimately scores them more points.

Bethel High School has 2-3 teams compete each year. This year, the event takes place in Wallingford on May 13th and 14th.

The freshman class has been working unbelievably hard on their projects, and call themselves Trout Transit.

Trout Transit focuses on the bridge, right out of the school complex, at the Plumtrees Road at the bottom of Whittlesey Drive. The bridge overlays East Swamp Brook, which contains a protected Brown Trout species. The bridge is in horrible condition, yet the town has been putting off construction because of these trout. The Freshman Academy motive is to come up with an innovative, technology based model, that will solve this issue – to both preserve the species of trout and update the bridge.

If you would like to support Trout Transit, their Twitter is @trouttransit , and their Youtube is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdULOuP75ssSixyb_ot3zlw.  Be sure to keep updated on their latest progress!