Weston Middle School “Message in a Bottle” Found

Our Weston Middle School’s “Image in a Bottle Project” Floats Ashore in Spain Two Years Later

Sagemont School student Maria Paredes washes up on the shore of Spain!

Well…her bottle did, anyway.

In the spring of 2014, approximately 80 students created collages of their lives, wrote a “letters to the world”, sealed them in bottles they decorated which were sent out to sea from Ft. Lauderdale. The project was called “Image in a Bottle” which middle school art teacher Scott Hemeon conceived to challenge his students to consider how they wanted to project their image to a global community…a virtual concept delivered in an old-fashioned way.

Two years later, and an ocean away, one of those bottles washed ashore where a fisherman found it encrusted in shells on a remote stretch of beach near Bilbao, in northern Spain. A newspaper reporter from El Correo newspaper was contacted to investigate the find. Using contact information in the bottle, he reached across the ocean to The Sagemont School where he learned of the project and the lucky girl whose bottle was found, and provided us with the details of the extraordinary discovery.