Kids learning to make lettuce into soil
Published 1:00 am, Saturday, December 13, 2008
"It's going to turn into soil," the second-grader said. "It's good. It could help the earth."
The fourth-graders in teacher Heather Clifford 's class taught their schoolmates about the value of recycling leftovers and how to do it after spending a couple of months composting in their classroom.
Fourth-grader Brendan Leslie was among the students who visited classrooms to teach others about composting. His mother, Dorina, taught his class the process.
"I think it's a pretty big deal," Brendan said during lunch Wednesday. Especially since the school moved pretty quickly in the last two years from starting to recycle to composting lunch scraps.
Posters are being made to remind the second- through fourth-graders which foods can be recycled.
Apple cores, vegetables without butter, salad without dressing, bread without mayonnaise or mustard, and seeds and nuts can be composted. Meats, dairy products, chocolate, candy and chips cannot.
Parent volunteers are scheduled to move the recyclable food each day to a wooden compost bin behind the school that parent Bill Weis made. It's divided into three sections, so the food and other materials can be moved from bin to bin as they continue to decompose.
The students will need time to get into the practice of recycling food, Clifford said.
"It's a process. It will be exciting to see how we'll progress in the next few months and in the next couple of years."
A group of teachers called the Green Team meets to find ways to be more environmentally responsible in the school.
They received a grant from the Brookfield Education Foundation to start the composting operation and to build a garden next spring that will use the compost.
The teachers visited Mansfield Middle School and Warren Elementary School to view their compost operations.
"We wanted to take their ideas and apply them here," Clifton said. "I think it's simple idea that will work for us. We're always making changes, but I think it's a great tool."
The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection wrote a manual to help schools start composting, but it does not know how many do, according to K.C. Alexander , DEP's organic recycling specialist.
"It's something we encourage and hope schools will implement, but it's not something we track," he said.
It's hard for institutions to get a lot of people to cooperate in composting, Alexander said, but at the same time, it's the institutions that have the most impact.
"The hardest part is getting people motivated and committed to make it work. You need the buy-in of the school administrators," Alexander said. "But institutions are the best places to go, because you get the biggest bang for your buck. There are a lot of people in one place and they are generating a lot of organics."
Fourth-grader Aharon Schwartz said composting is fun.
"I think it's really good," he said. "It teaches kids not to throw away all their food. It can turn into rich dirt."
Nine-year-old Deeptri Sriram described how the composting operation will include layering newspapers on the food scraps, while Samantha D'Aquila , also 9, said she knew about composting before her class took on the project.
"My poppy did it a lot and I helped him," she said. "He has a really big garden."
Principal Sharon Beitel , who was on compost patrol Wednesday, said she'll have someone standing by to help children learn what is appropriate to put in the bins.
"Every day we'll get a little better," she said.
Clifford said her students are proud of what they know about composting, and she thinks that will spread throughout the school over time.
"It's a habit after a while," she said. "If someone doesn't do it, they'll catch them and tell them. It's nice that they have that responsibility."
Contact Eileen FitzGerald
or at (203) 731-3333.
Classroom composting Composting in the school lunch room Can be composed: Apple and pear cores, banana peels Dried fruit Vegetables without butter Salad without dressing Coffee grinds Bread without mayonnaise or mustard Nuts and seeds Can't be composed: Meat Dairy products, including cheese, milk, yogurt and ice cream Fats or oils Bread with peanut better or jelly Chocolate or other candy Chips Plastic baggies, forks and spoons Juice boxes or pouches About 25 percent of Connecticut's trash is food and lawn waste that can be composted. Each person in Connecticut makes about 4.2 pounds of trash every day, or 1,533 pounds a year. Connecticut residents make 5 billion pounds of trash each year. Source: Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority