BY Wende O’Brien
Eddy Elementary
Our goals are to educate children at a young age the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling. It teaches them to be responsible and to develop vital habits that hopefully, will used and retaught for the rest of their lives. We live in a fragile environment and it is essential that we participate in caring for it. Our objective is to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as we can with the children and teach them how they can do this in school and everywhere they go. Our fourth grade recycling group collects paper, plastic, glass and some metal each week from every room in the Eddy school. The children are assigned to an area of the building and are responsible for it. They take great pride in doing this. Our cafeteria is now set up to collect any recyclable the children generate from lunch. The food waste is collected in bins as well as a bucket for milk, juice and water. They are aware and excited that the food scraps go to a Brewster farmer, who feeds it to his pigs. The recycling process is done by the students in the cafeteria and runs like clockwork.
How will the project be evaluated (e.g. how will you gauge its success)
The project evaluation goes on daily as you hear one student remind another that they forgot to recycle something from their lunch, a child will ask a teacher if the project scraps should go in the classroom recycling bin and you also will hear a student catch an adult who accidentally forgets to recycle. The output of trash has been reduced by half and the amount of recycling has tripled. This saves the school and the town of Brewster money and has taken advantage of a critical teachable moment that will last a lifetime.
Benefit to the students and the school
From the questions above the benefit is obvious. We all benefit from learning responsibility and good habits that are useful for an entire lifetime.
Budget (Please detail how funding will be used. Itemize as appropriate.)
The funds will be used to strengthen our current program. We would like to purchase some posters for the school and new bins to hold recycling material. We have a new idea to build a special table that our bins would fit into and make clearing the tray easier for the children and make the transfer of food waste easier for us to give it to the farmer. We would like to take the children to the recycling center at the Brewster Landfill to view recycling at a grander scale and a trip to see the pigs.
Timeline
Our project runs from the first day of school until the last school day in June. Our custodial staff continues to recycle during the summer when the children aren’t there.