Students Clean Up Their Beach : Earth Day: When your playground consists of sand and ocean, you want to make sure that there’s no trash.

Hilary Havens is a spunky, angelic kindergartner, barely more than one-billionth the age of planet Earth but undaunted in her quest to save it.

“I found a bunch of scraps of paper there, and lots of Styrofoam there,” the 6-year-old told her teacher with pride, using her small, litter-laden fists to point to wind-swept patches of beach.

She paused from her morning’s work just long enough to receive some murmurs of praise from her teacher before getting back down in the sand on a pair of bare knees, digging out more telltale signs of human thoughtlessness.

Her efforts were part of Earth Day celebrations at Newport Elementary School in Newport Beach--or, more accurately, on Newport Beach, since the 97-year-old school sits directly on the strand at 14th Street and Balboa Boulevard. In what school officials hope will become an annual tradition, Hilary and about 400 students from kindergarten through sixth grade fanned out Monday morning to scour a 15-block swath of beach just south of the Newport Pier, not far from their classroom doors.

“This is their playground,” said teacher Frank Viauso as he marshaled his fifth-graders into cleanup cadres. “They don’t have big yards (at home) like in Costa Mesa or Tustin. This is where they live.”

“They really care,” added PTA vice president Susan Dow, who helped organize the day’s activities, along with teachers and administrators. “They’re really involved in the beach. It’s people from Pasadena and Riverside that come down here and leave their trash here.”

To the music of breaking surf, shrieking gulls and even rap star Vanilla Ice, the children worked under overcast skies to collect the refuse left behind by other, less ecologically minded beach-goers. As the young crews excavated piles of cigarette butts, glass bottles and plastic straws, teachers and volunteer parents carefully logged each item so that the students could identify later what types of trash were left lying around most.

Sharp-eyed youngsters found a variety of items, including a small golden token, apparently good for entrance to a restroom somewhere in the heart of Indianapolis.

“It’s amazing what you find down here,” said Tom Holbrook, 39, a sales manager who took the morning off from work to join his daughter’s third-grade class. “You find a lot of plastic and bottles but no cans, since people scour the beach for them for recycling.”

One girl hit pay dirt--literally.

“I found a nickel,” boasted Cici Neslen, 9. “And I kept it.”

In the weeks before Earth Day, classes studied oceanography, discussed beach safety and examined the effects of non-perishable trash on marine life. Monday’s cleanup effort was the culmination of a schoolwide effort to convert environmental awareness into action right in the school’s back yard.

“We’ve been learning a lot about the ocean, what the ocean does, and the smog,” said fifth-grader Jaclyn Schart, 11, an animal lover who tends to more than two dozen pets of various shapes and sizes at home even as she pulls in straight A’s at school.

Monday’s activities were important because they “really teach us about the environment,” she said, then spotted a piece of plastic on the sand.

“People don’t realize that plastic will stay there for years, until we have kids,” she said, stooping to snatch up the object of her displeasure. “We have to pick up these kinds of things or it’ll be there forever.”