Pleasant Hills student wins PA DEP Radon Poster contest

Samantha Strope, an eighth-grade student at the Pleasant Hills Middle School, won first-place in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) 2021 Student Radon Poster Contest.

Strope was among three middle school students who were recognized at a press conference held at the Capitol Media Center in Harrisburg. She is a student in Sarah Hartnett’s eighth grade Biology class at PHMS.

The winning poster highlighted that radon is the nation’s second leading cause of lung cancer. Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer among nonsmokers.

“I was pretty excited,” Strope said about when she was notified about her winning entry. “I drew three different ideas and then put them all into one. I thought about it for about an hour before I started drawing and then it took two to three hours to the do line art on paper.”

Strope’s poster will be entered in the 2022 National Radon Poster Contest, sponsored by the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors. The top three PA posters will be used throughout the year for educational outreach.

Pennsylvania DEP Executive Deputy Secretary for Programs Ramez Ziadeh and Second Lady Gisele Fetterman recognized the three students and encouraged Pennsylvanians to test their homes for radon as part of National Radon Action Month. Radon is a radioactive gas that occurs naturally in the ground. Because of its geology, Pennsylvania has some of the highest levels of radon in the United States.