AUGUSTA — Seven of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 38 New England award winners announced Monday are from Maine, agency officials said.

EPA officials said Local, State or Federal Government Environmental Merit Awards went to:

• Jean M. Firth of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection who has helped a number of communities around the state obtain grants to clean up environmental hazards to open the way for development projects;

• Eight members of the Maine Children’s Water Festival Planning Committee: Wendy Garland, Rob Sanford, Irwin Novak, Linda Woodard, Sarah Plummer, Lynne Richard, Beth Pratt and Susan Breau-Kelley, for helping to teach more than 800 Maine children about water-related environmental issues;

• The Maine Clean School Bus Team, made up of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, the Maine Department of Education and the Maine Association of Pupil Transportation, which established the nation’s first program with an $500,000 EPA grant to retrofit 266 school buses to reduce diesel emissions, with state education officials matching the effort by replacing 180 buses and retrofitting more than 400 other buses.

EPA Business, Industry and Professional Organizations Environmental Merit Awards went to:

• The Maine Water and Wastewater Agency Response Networks for its part in developing the New England State Water and Wastewater Response Networks’ emergency mutual aid system which has become a national model, an EPA spokesman said;

• Pottle’s Transportation Inc. of Bangor for the development of incentives and new technology to reduce idling of diesel trucks.

Pat Baldwin of Mousam received an EPA Lifetime Achievement Environmental Merit Award for her more than three decades of monitoring the health of Mousam Lake.

The Kennebunk-Kennebunkport School District received the Environmental, Community, Academia and Non-Profit Organization Environmental Merit Award for reducing energy use and operating costs led by Director of Operations Tom Maines and Operations Administrative Assistant Alyce Swan.

The New England EPA awards were handed out Monday at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, officials said.