A group of Anaheim elementary students are learning the value of garbage — and composting.
Thursday mornings are busy — even before school starts at Adelaide Price Elementary. The Recycling Club line up in their green shirts, standing with a pair of large yellow trashcans and a banner that reads: Recycle Thursday! Help heal the Earth.
The message gets through. A steady flow of people and cars move by, dropping off plastic bottles and aluminum cans as the group chants: “Who recycles? We recycle! What do we recycle? Bottles and cans. Bottles and cans.”
And so continues the lesson on the value of garbage.
Anaheim’s Adelaide Price Elementary is part of a pilot program of 20 schools participating in the Eco Challenge, the product of a partnership between the Orange County Department of Education’s long-running environmental education program, Inside the Outdoors, and OC Waste and Recycling.
The goal isn’t just about teaching a few points on sustainability, it’s about changing behavior. At Adelaide Price Elementary, it’s succeeding.
“Students are very much aware of the effects trash has on the environment,” says Yarib Dheming, outreach manager for Inside the Outdoors. “Whether it’s at home, the ocean or even their local park, they see what is happening around them. Creating a curriculum that is specifically designed to engage students around the topic of trash is not only important in supporting classroom instruction, but helps them understand what happens when they throw something away.”
Dheming says the program teaches the essentials of landfill processes, organic waste diversion and resource recovery in kid-friendly ways via classroom lessons and engaging activities.
“Environmental education lessons learned outdoors, in a living laboratory, bring textbook concepts to life in an extraordinary and memorable way for students,” Dheming says. “Every child deserves the opportunity to explore their local natural spaces. Students are inspired to help their schools and communities, and ultimately, that’s our goal with environmental literacy education — to empower the next generation of environmental stewards.”
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The next generation is also Principal Monica Valencia’s job, as she gets to see the learning — and behavior-changing process — play out on a daily basis.
“As our scholars collect recyclables each Thursday, they develop a sense of advocacy for our environment,” Valencia says. “The process comes full circle when the Recycling Club takes recyclables to the local recycle center, where they redeem the bottles and cans for cash. For many students, this is the first time they have been to a recycle center and are often surprised to get cash for recycling. They can make a difference in this world starting at a young age. Wearing their green recycling shirts has become a sense of pride.”
It’s all part of the larger effect the Inside the Outdoors program has on OC students, but Valencia sees the club as turning the curriculum into action.
“As early as kindergarten, students explore how they can protect the environment from change that harms it and apply this knowledge to their school campus,” she says. “As anchoring and investigative phenomena increase in complexity, scholars learn how to help protect animals on the endangered species list and to think about cities of the future and how we can protect our planet. This student-centered approach to learning and problem-solving starts with their textbook and then applied to the practices occurring on campus, however, Recycling Club takes it a step further by engaging students in real-world practices outside of the classroom they can adopt into their everyday lives.”
With a goal of eventually reaching zero waste on campus, it’s not just about recycling. The role of composting — often referred to as “organic waste diversion” — is also taught in a hands-get-dirty kind of way.
“As a school, we want to empower our scholars and their families to divert organic waste effectively,” Valencia says. “Our hope is they help develop greener habits with their families. If we can get our scholars to learn good habits at an early age, it’s more likely they’ll continue those habits as adults.”
Valencia says one of the students “taught her grandpa how to compost because he loves to garden and grows fruits and vegetables at home.” She says it’s “a special project” between the two of them.
And so continues the lesson on the value of garbage.
By Shawn Price
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