BRUNSWICK, Maine — Students from Presque Isle Middle School and Ashland District School attended the 11th annual KIDS Consortium Student Summit March 24-25 at Bowdoin College where they shared and celebrated the service learning projects they have been working on to help “green” their schools and communities.
KIDS Consortium, based in Auburn, is a nationally recognized leader in service learning. The organization works with teachers, administrators and students to involve students in addressing real challenges in their communities. Together they identify, research and work to address local community needs.
Environmental service learning projects Summit participants are implementing range from school gardens to improving water quality in local lakes to reducing energy use in schools.
Presque Isle Middle School
Seventh-graders in Cindy Cote’s science/math class titled their project, “Just Eat It.” After visiting the Presque Isle landfill and conducting an investigation of school waste, students decided to focus on reducing the amount of food waste that is generated in the cafeteria and to compost usable food waste with red wiggler worms.
“After doing an inventory of the cafeteria waste, we weighed how much food waste there was, and for that one particular day, there was 53 pounds, and we decided that was an awful lot of food waste,” said Cote. “Worms will eat approximately their weight each day. I bought 1,500 worms or 15 pounds of worms, so the maximum we can have is 15 pounds of food waste per day, which would be in the best conditions. We’re actually shooting for a maximum of 6 or 7 pounds of food waste per day so we can feed the worms that amount.”
Teams of students visited the 18 homeroom classes in the school. Each team presented the project goals and shared their research about the school cafeteria waste problem with the student body.
“Motivating the entire student body to get on board with this project will be an ongoing challenge,” Cote said, “and will require the project implementers to communicate the project’s success and perhaps needs.
“A couple weeks after the students went to the different homerooms, we measured the food waste again and it was a total of 30 pounds,” she said. “We’ve gone down some. We started taking the cafeteria food waste and giving it to the worms last week.”
Dana Fowler, Presque Isle director of solid waste, donated a black composting bin that will be used outside to compost excess food waste that the red wiggler worms can’t eat.
During the inventory of cafeteria waste, students realized that 90 percent of the food waste was bread.
“At the sub line, for example, students have to take the bread when many of them only want the meat, cheese or vegetables,” said Cote. “Our head cook, Deb Sowers, is a key person in helping us reduce the amount of food wasted. She is willing to make changes to the food offerings upon our survey results and recommendations.
“Students’ bread choices were bulky rolls, wheat bread and a wrap, but they’ve since put on the line a hotdog roll, as well as white bread to give them more choices,” she said. “That might be attributing to why we have a reduced amount of waste. In addition to bread choices, the survey asked the students if they felt they had enough food or felt they were getting too much and that’s why they were throwing it away. We’re in the process of reviewing those survey results.”
Students plan to use the worm castings to “green” the area around the north side of the building.
“We’re going to create a garden and use the worm castings as fertilizer,” said Cote, noting that students will learn about and facilitate more traditional methods of composting, as well as the vermicomposting. “We’re calling it a butterfly garden. They’ll research the native plants that will promote butterflies and other animal habitat to be in the area. We’ll be doing that later this school year.”
In addition to the butterfly garden, the Just Eat It project will help reduce the amount of food wasted, which will in turn save the district money both in cost of food and trash removal, and will decrease the amount of space in the Presque Isle Landfill.
Attending the Summit from Cote’s classroom were Hailey Cameron and Kellsey Michaud.
“I like the fact that we get to use worms to help with the composting,” said Cameron. “I’m not afraid of worms; they’re kind of cool. I also liked how we were trying to decrease the amount of food. A lot of kids had been wasting food and now they’re not wasting as much, which is a big difference.
“I hope through this project that kids will eat all their food so there won’t be any food waste at all — just the tray and paper,” she said. “I’m going to have a fun time with the butterfly garden. I want to learn how to plant flowers because I’ve never done that before.”
Cameron said she enjoyed attending the Summit.
“I got to listen to presentations from students both in-state and out-of-state,” she said. “We saw one about ‘vampire energy,’ and I had no clue what that was. It’s when you keep something plugged in too long and it sucks out the energy in the building. It was interesting.
“We got to stay in a hotel that was really nice,” said Cameron. “The whole trip was great and I’m glad I got to go.”
Seventh-graders in Elaine Hendrickson’s English/social studies classes researched the “PIMS and the Plastic Tray Project.”
“Students were very concerned that the cafeteria is using Styrofoam to feed the kids food every day and they discovered that Styrofoam is not biodegradable and it just goes to the landfill and sits there forever,” said Hendrickson. “There’s also a toxin called styrene that leeches out into the soil that’s very dangerous. They felt that we should replace the Styrofoam with plastic trays.”
The students went to the cafeteria and counted the number of trays that were used per day.
“We use approximately 200 trays every day,” said Hendrickson. “Then they figured 200 trays times 175 days of school means we send 35,000 trays to the landfill every year. When Skyway and Cunningham combined into PIMS six years ago, the decision was made to get rid of the plastic trays.
“The students have since talked to Mrs. Sowers and Kathy Allen, food services director for SAD 1, about ordering plastic trays,” Hendrickson said. “Both ladies seem to be on board with it. The students will next talk to our principal, Anne Blanchard. We spend approximately $2,625 a year on Styrofoam trays. If we got 210 plastic trays, it would cost about $675, which would save the school $1,950.”
Hendrickson’s students who attended the Summit included Lucie Simpson, Alyssa Sweeney and Alyssa Hewitt.
“I thought it was really shocking that we use that much Styrofoam and that we spend that much on trays a year,” said Simpson. “I really hope we’ll go back to plastic trays and save our school some money. Styrofoam takes up 25-30 percent of the landfill, so we would be saving the landfill a little, too.”
Simpson said her mother runs a daycare and when she told her about the project, her mother decided to stop using Styrofoam.
“She used Styrofoam cups and plates, but now she’s switched to plastic,” said Simpson. “Not only am I helping to educate people at school, but I’m helping others learn at home.”
Simpson said she liked meeting students from throughout the Northeast at the Summit.
“I got to meet students from other places and learn what they’re doing to make their schools green. I knew I could present in front of people and thought it would be fun,” she said. “I hope we go back to plastic trays. It would be neat knowing that I had a role in that.”
Hendrickson’s other students are doing a service learning project called, “PIMS and the Recycling Project.”
“This group is investigating the amount of paper that is being recycled in the school with the intent of increasing that amount to reduce the amount of paper going to the landfill,” she said. “The first time they collected the recycled paper, they found 23 pounds was being recycled. Since we now have blue recycling trash cans in each room and in the halls, they will be measuring once again to see if the amount has increased. They are also making plans to do a number of activities to promote recycling.”
Ashland District School
To educate and to reduce paper waste going to the landfill, and to reduce energy consumption in the school, grade 6-8 students in Tricia Bragan’s environmental classes worked on the “Mean Green Recycling Machine.”
“We conducted a green school survey, and with that information, decided to start with the biggest concern/want, which was to add more recycle bins to the school. To see if we have made an impact, we have collected and weighed the recycled paper for four weeks and will compare that to what we will collect with additional recycle bins in the classrooms,” said Bragan. “It’s our goal to increase awareness through the survey, remind students, and increase the number of recycle bins throughout the school to reduce the amount of paper waste in our landfill.
“We also wanted to reduce the energy consumption at our school after we went to an energy workshop hosted by Maine Public Service,” she said. “We decided to monitor laptop use for two weeks. We noticed students were reckless in their use of energy by not turning off their computers. It’s our goal to educate them on the cost and being responsible by turning off their computers.”
In addition to supplying more recycle bins to the school, which causes less paper to go into the garbage therefore less paper in the landfills, the school is also meeting the needs of the younger children in a hands-on way.
“Through reading and the educational support for younger students, we are meeting our school’s needs,” said Bragan, noting that she hopes to unite the school by having a contest for upcycling waste that would normally be thrown out. “It is also our goal to bring the school and community together by starting a garden.”
As the students were collecting data, they realized they had another problem on their hands.
“There were things going into the recycle bin that couldn’t be recycled,” Bragan said. “With the help of another teacher, they discovered teracylce, a great way to upcycle products that would ordinarily go in the landfill and the school can raise money as an added bonus!”
At the Summit, which was attended by Wyatt Carr, Dawson Lane and Peng Cheng, the students shared how they researched green school projects and wanted to make their school more energy/environmentally conscious.
“I wanted to share our project and to learn from other schools,” said Carr.
Lane and Cheng also liked hearing from the other students that attended the two-day event.
“I wanted to see all the other facts and presentations the other schools had come up with,” said Cheng.
“I wanted to show others what we were doing at our school to make it greener and to get ideas of what other schools were doing,” said Lane.
Though fun, “The Mean Green Recycling Machine” project also helped teach the students along the way.
“I learned that some things we can’t recycle, but we can upcycle them to make new products,” said Cassidy Pelletier.
Student Alex Lewin said he enjoyed reading to the younger kids about recycling and the dangers of disregarding the health of the environment.
“It was nice hearing that they already knew some of the benefits of recycling,” said Lewin.
The Ashland students said one of the highlights of the trip was stopping and eating at the Texas Roadhouse in Bangor.
In addition to the teams from Ashland and Presque Isle, students attending the Summit came from Mount Desert Island, Calais, Portland, Lincoln, Auburn, South Paris, Duxbury, Vt., Lisbon, Conn., New Bedford and Norwell, Mass.; and Albany, N.Y.
