WASHINGTON (WUSA9) — Three black teenagers are finalists in a NASA contest but when they promoted their project on social media, the comments turned ugly and racist.
The Banneker High School Juniors are impressive and make a great team. Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner and Bria Snell have been friends since freshman year and wanted to help people through their project. They were inspired by their own water fountains in the school.
“We had to have some of our water fountains closed because of the lead issue,” said India Skinner, who celebrated her birthday on Thursday. “So we wanted to create a water filtration system that would purify unclean water found in public schools.”
“So Ms. Marissa, our coach from IN3 (Inclusive Innovation Incubator), introduced us to this project in November,” continued Sharrieff, “and we were all interested because we want to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math). African American young girls and women of color are underrepresented in this field so we wanted to promote ourselves and show other young girls you can do it and don’t let race be a barrier.”
Sharrieff’s one tweet was retweeted more than 2 thousand times and then the haters showed up and the racial attacks began.
“We decided not to worry about that and remain positive and keep smiles on our faces because everything about this is a great experience,” said Bria Snell.
So the bigger picture for these young ladies?
“Our goal is to get to NASA and hopefully and do more collaborations with them and hopefully we can implement our project into public schools in DC,” said Skinner, “and hopefully spread around the world so we can help people get clean water.”
They might be one step closer to some of those goals, with a grant from the Mayor Muriel Bowser for $4,000. NASA did not return calls or emails on this story for our deadline, but told our partners at the Washington Post, “NASA…encourages all of our children to reach for the stars.” NASA stopped the online voting process because they say the system was tampered with due to the negative feedback.
Winners of the contest are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
To see their project as well as the other students from around the country being considered for this NASA contest click here.
