SANTA ANA, Calif. – California’s students and parents are bickering over which group is better at saving water amid the worst drought in the state’s history.

Pasadena parent Leigh Smyth told 89.3 KPCC her oldest teenager is the worst water waster in her home, while she has worked to save water any way she can.

“I think about it every day,” Smyth said. “I started capturing my shower water in the morning as it’s warming up.”

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Jill Lytle, a high school science teacher, reflects on lessons she learned during droughts growing up in Orange County in the 1980s, and tries to teach her students why it’s important to save water.

“Most of us, if we look back at junior high and high school and think about the classes we took, we have forgotten most of the facts that we were taught,” Lytle told KPCC. “It’s important to me to try and teach them about the world that they live in because maybe those are lessons they can take with them.”

Lytle’s students, Godinez Fundamental High School seniors Natalie Martinez and Erick Jimenez, are working to analyze an area creek and are applying the water lessons learned at school to their home life.

Both believe it’s their duty to rely that information to their parents, who they don’t believe are as in-tune to water problems as their high school environmental science class, according to the news site.

“He would leave the hose on and I would just buck him, I’m like, ‘Dad, you’re in a drought, you’re wasting water, don’t do it,’” Martinez said.

“I would say that our generation is kind of more aware about things,” Jimenez added.

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But for many California parents, the current drought – the worst on record – isn’t their first rodeo. The state experienced serious water shortages in the late 1970s, and more recently between 1897 and 1993, KPCC reports.

They remember cartoon characters like Ricky the Raindrop and others who helped teach youngsters about water conservation over the last four decades.

“The Orange County municipal water district used Ricki to teach kids about the water cycle and how important it was to conserve,” mother of two Kristiana Kubasek said.

Some of those lessons are the same as her twins in the fourth grade are learning in school now, such as the old adage “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown flush it down,” Kubasek said.

But California students today are taking their environmental knowledge to the next level with hands-on learning, such as the Godinez creek project.

Students gathered water in a pitcher from a creek near the high school last winter and analyzed the living organisms in the sample. They conducted the same exercise recently to compare results.

Since November, the water level had dropped significantly, barely providing enough to sample.

“It smells, like, disgusting,” student Tiona Jones told the radio station. “It’s like old rotten trash that’s just been sitting there for days.”

The sulfur smell is a byproduct of decaying material exposed by the low water level, but it’s the test results that are the real eye-opener.

“We just aren’t finding that much living in here today. So that’s not good,” Lytle, the teacher leading the project, told KPCC. “ … (P)artly it’s because the water level is so low. There isn’t a lot of space for living things to survive.”