Sustainability In Our Schools (S.O.S.) Recycling Everything

Applicant and/or teacher sponsor:
Jennifer Kalvass


Student Groups /Teachers/ Community Members/ Partnerships Involved:
Resource program, Environmental concerns class, and other interested middle school students, Activities Director, SIP, High School resource program and Math A class, Linda White, Adopt-A-Watershed, Mendocino Community Garden, classified staff and food service program, custodial staff, Paul Raisanen, Tobin Hahn, Linda Leyva, Binet Payne in Laytonville

Number of students affected:
300 students in the middle school, 5-10 students actively running the program

Length of project:
1997- 99 and ongoing

1. Brief description of the project:

Students will participate in an assesssent of what needs to be recycled at the school and how that can be accomplished. Students will then design and implement the recycling plans, including paper, aluminum, plastic, glass, kitchen food waste.

Activities will include bi-monthly trips to the recycling center in Fort Bragg, responsibility for collecting, weighing, charting recyclable materials. Students will design and build vermiculture bins and participate in the building of the greenhouse.



2. Connections
How does the project connect with our theme of people, history, and place? How does the project interact with the community?
How does the project connect with other NCRCN members/ sites?
How does the project invite student planning/student choice?

Students directly participating in the project will interact with the community in several ways:
-They will interact with community members during their bi-monthly visits to the recycling center and on other fieldtrips.
-They will communicate to the staff and students at the school during their weekly collection times and through the school weekly bulletin.
-Students will communicate to the larger community by articulating their participation in the project through their favorite mode of expression, i.e. designing a brochure, developing a website, talking to a service club, filming a video, writing an article for the local paper, discussion on a radio show, etc.


The project design will involve a visit to Laytonville and a follow-up video conference to learn more about their program and its implementation.
Many choices within the project will be available to students. An emphasis will be to encourage students to be self-directed, independent learners. Students will share their knowledge through a preferred mode of expression.


3. Student Learning
How will the project improve student learning?
How will you evaluate or assess what students have learned? What kind of data will you collect? Action Research question?
How will you evaluate or assess the community impact?
How will students share their project and learning with others at their own site, other sites or within the community? How will students be involved in the evaluation of the project?
Will your project have a service learning component? If so please describe.

Students will be learning math concepts through a project based program. It?s concrete and they can take a lesson from class that is more abstract i.e. surface area and volume, and relate it to actual things with which they are working.

Students are learning about methods for disposing of waste and learning about the advantages and disadvantages of each of those systems.
As students collect recyclables they will weigh and chart and graph the amounts. Students will be interpreting the data and presenting the data to the whole school. Students will be working with budgets and using the money earned at the recycling center to purchase equipment and materials to further their program. A sample of this work will be collected from each student to be used in evaluation of the learning during this project .

Students will keep journals and may communicate their knowledge to the school and to the community through the school?s weekly bulletin, the community newspaper or other ways.Three written reflections will be collected for each student in the service learning project. One early in the project, one during the project and one at the end. Students will use the KWL format. What do I KNOW, what do I WANT to know, what have I LEARNED.

Action Research question:How will the emphasis on recycling impact the amount of garbage the school takes to the dump weekly?




4. Support
What kind of support would you like from the coordinator/TSA?
What kinds of funds will you need for the project? Please supply a general budget. (Staff development, release time for planning, transportation, materials.)
What other sources might provide additional funding for the project?
The coordinator will be used to coordinate visits and video exchanges to other districts and to help order materials. She will also be used as a sounding board to help expand, extend and link the recycling project to other projects.

Total Budget $980

Staff development: ($150) A total of two days of release time are requested to participate in a fieldtrip to Laytonvillle, to participate in videoconference meetings and consultation with other networking districts and to develop and arrange methods of communicating the project to the community.

Transportation: ($150) Funds are requested for teacher, student and interested parents to visit local and other district sites to be determined as valuable to the development of the recycling project. Funds are also requested for gas for the bi-monthly trips to the recycling center. $5.00 x 18= $90 x 2 years=($180).

Materials and supplies: $500 is requested for building materials for the greenhouse, worm bins, composting bins, garden raised beds, books related to vermiculture which have been previewed prior to purchase, and subscription to the Worm Digest.