A group of gifted students at Fayetteville Intermediate School have thought up a simple and cheap way to conserve water.

Their efforts will lead to the distribution of 12,000 water-saving “devices” that will reduce water used in toilets.

The device: An empty plastic water bottle. On the bottle will be a set of directions to fill it with water from the toilet tank itself and leave it standing upright inside the tank.

For the students’ ingenuity, the school is receiving a $2,000 donation from Home Depot for being selected as the top water conservation plan in the state by Gov. Sonny Perdue.

The money will be used to purchase the water bottles, which will be emptied by students drinking them at school and then collected in drop boxes to be cleaned and labeled.

The idea came out of brainstorming sessions led by FIS gifted teacher Heidi Johnson, whose students went to work on researching how they could help conserve water. Some of the early ideas included leak detection kits and buckets to catch the first water from morning showers, but they were deemed too expensive, Johnson said.

Then the students set their sights on toilets, learning online from water conservation websites that 27-30 percent of toilet water is wasted, Johnson said.

FIS Principal Kim Herron said the project was beneficial not only to the gifted students but others in the school who came up with ideas for the project.

“To me it’s about the brainstorming of the students and the research of ideas that we strive for,” Herron said.

Organizers are scrambling to figure out where they’re going to store the thousands of empty water bottles until they can be distributed.

The bottles, replete with the directions, will be given to each student at all Fayetteville schools to take home. The directions will be on a specially-designed paper tied to the neck of the bottle along with the promotional acronym PEACH: “Protect the Environment and Conserve our H2O.”

The plan is to have the entire student body involved with tying on the instructions to each bottle. Each student will have to produce 24 bottles, Johnson said.

Johnson’s gifted students keep tabs on current events, so they are very aware of the latest happenings in Georgia’s water crisis, she noted. Now with the governor’s award, they are on their way to doing their part to conserve water.

Ironically, however, they’ll have to consume the water at the same time: drinking each of the 12,000 water bottles. That in turn should temporarily cut down on trips to the water fountain, officials said.