On a cold winter morning, Olivia Arnold joins her friend Valerie Vujnovich on an exotic trip with their fathers down the Wilkinson Canal in Plaquemines Parish, past the fishing camps and into Barataria Bay.

About 10 miles east of Grand Isle, they step onto a tiny island where hundreds of brown pelicans and other species have nested.

"It's pretty great that it's still here at least," said Valerie as the girls walked along a shell beach.

Heavily oiled in the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the four main islands of Cat Bay have all but vanished. Although the islands had steadily eroded in recent decades, and were heavily damaged in the 2005 hurricanes, Plaquemines Parish government has blamed the spill for hastening their demise.

"It's sad to see something this beautiful wash away," Olivia said.

Until recently, Olivia had only vague idea about the coastal land loss that has changed the landscape of south Louisiana.

"I've heard it once or twice, but I never actually took interest in finding out what it actually is."

That all changed when the girls and their eighth-grade classmates were assigned a social justice project at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Belle Chasse. Like the eighth-graders one year earlier, they adopted another island, which locals call "Cat Island." Not to be confused with its famous namesake in Mississippi, this Cat Island serves as a poster child of the spill.

Classmate Katie Goens said she tells people the island is, "the size of a speed bump and it's shrinking."

That turns out to be only a slight exaggeration. Stretching roughly 4 acres in April of 2010, Cat Island now is devoid of vegetation. The almost-skeletal remains of dead mangrove trees sprout from the little remaining soil and from shells pushed up by wave action. This very grown-up problem registered with the class along with the urgency of taking action along Louisiana's coast.

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School assignment inspires 8th graders to try to save tiny island