OXNARD : Ecology Play Offers Lesson in Recycling

Packed with educational songs and featuring comic characters like Groober the puppet and the Trash Monster, the ecology play staged at Santa Clara Elementary School in Oxnard on Friday was not your typical school play.

From the recycling rap song performed by students to the gross-out lyrics of a song about Sara Cynthia Sylvia Stout (“a girl who wouldn’t take the garbage out”), the message of the day was--in the words of the rap song--to “reduce, reuse, recycle and compost.”

Presented by the Ventura Regional Sanitation District, the skits entertained about 100 first- through third-graders, who cheered, squealed, raised their hands and groaned at all the right moments.

Leslie Carson, a Fillmore High School drama teacher and self-described “trashologist” for the sanitation district, was the genial host of the program, designed to teach environmental values to children.

Donning a hat decorated with bad (non-recyclable) trash and blinking lights, Carson used every trick in her teacher’s book to encourage the students to participate. Soon she had the children chanting the three kinds of plastic that can be recycled in Oxnard.

“ONE . . . TWO . . . FOUR . . . ONE . . . TWO . . . FOUR,” the students chanted, referring to the identifying numbers on the bottom of plastic containers.

Stan Hakes, Oxnard’s recycling coordinator and parent of a Santa Clara first-grader, made a special cameo appearance as the snarling Trash Monster.

“He gets mean if we recycle,” said Carson. As the children snatched recyclable trash out of his pockets, the monster shriveled until he was just a heap on the floor.

The student rap group closed the show with the two-line chorus: “Buy stuff you can recycle; recycle the stuff you buy.” The grade-school audience cheered with enthusiasm.

Santa Clara Principal Dotty Massa credited the student council with inviting the sanitation district to the school.

“Kids are the best teachers,” Massa said. “They’re the ones who are going to save us.”