Santa Rosa School--Give It an A-Plus for Its Recycling Efforts

Looking befuddled, the freckled 6-year-old boy peered over the large trash cans outside Santa Rosa School as he held an empty cookie wrapper in his outstretched hand.

“Where does this go?” he faintly asked the two bigger boys hovering nearby.

Without answering, one of the older students--third-grader Sean Pierik--grabbed the wrapper from the younger boy’s hand and thrust it into the garbage can for unrecyclable trash.

Sean and fellow third-grader Chris Mead are trash monitors at the kindergarten through sixth-grade school, which is part of Camarillo’s Pleasant Valley School District. Their mission: to ensure that even their youngest classmates adhere to a strict, lunchtime recycling program that county recycling coordinators say has made Santa Rosa an environmental leader among Ventura County schools.

It can be a dirty job.

Monitors sometimes have to dig through mounds of half-eaten sandwiches, empty chocolate-milk containers and other garbage to retrieve a recyclable can or paper bag that a classmate threw into the wrong bin. “They put paper in the trash, plastic in the paper,” 8-year-old Chris said. “You try to watch people that put things in the wrong spot.”

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Since last year, Santa Rosa’s 410 students have been recycling about two-thirds of their lunchtime trash--separating plastic sandwich bags, aluminum cans and other recyclable materials into different bins.

The school, in the pricey Santa Rosa Valley neighborhood between Camarillo and Thousand Oaks, has one of the most extensive lunchtime recycling programs of any Ventura County school, county recycling officials say.

And Santa Rosa officials hope to take the program even further.

Beginning early next year, the school plans to begin composting all of the half-eaten sandwiches, apple cores and other lunch remnants that are now thrown in the garbage.

Teachers and students will use the compost to fertilize a garden they are planting just behind the school for a class science project.

And within the next few months, Santa Rosa will also begin recycling its office and classroom paper, Principal Kathryn Merrill said, with the goal of reducing its total trash volume by 80%.

It all started last year, Merrill said, when older children on the student council became concerned that their classmates were throwing out much of the lunch food that they were bringing from home; untouched sandwiches, apples and pudding filled the garbage.

After deciding to collect uneaten food for distribution to homeless shelters, student leaders and school officials figured that they might as well launch the recycling project at the same time.

In addition to the environmental benefits, the recycling program’s greatest value is what it teaches students, Merrill said.

“The thrust in all curriculum areas is to do what you teach, to actually act on what you’re teaching kids,” she said.

The Santa Rosa program has attracted the attention and support of the county’s Solid Waste Management Department, which is donating a compost bin and office-paper recycling boxes to the school.

County recycling officials said they are focusing their education efforts on schools as a way to instill a consciousness of environmental issues in younger generations.

Moreover, waste management analyst Peter Kaiser said, children often carry home to their parents the lessons they learn at school. “The parents become very, very conscious of an environmental ethic just because of the pressure that children put on them,” he said.

And, he added: “The children that are being educated now are going to be the future politicians, the future leaders who are going to make sure that this ethic continues.”

The message to the children seems to be getting across.

Since the recycling and food collection efforts began, the amount of uneaten food that student monitors collect at the end of lunch periods has dropped dramatically, Merrill said.

“Either kids are bringing things they like to eat or they’re eating more of what they bring,” she said.

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Some students said separating their trash is just as easy as their old practice of stuffing it all into one overflowing garbage can.

“It helps a lot and it only takes a couple of minutes,” said 11-year-old Jamie Dipoma, a sixth-grade student.

But others complained about having to wait in the long lines that now form at the garbage cans. “It gets so boring,” 12-year-old Ted Leckman said.

Some evidently don’t think that recycling is worth the wait.

During a recent lunch period, a handful of children bypassed the lines to dash from the outdoor lunch area to the playground.

As they ran past, the children tossed their brown lunch bags--still filled with leftover food and recyclable plastic--into the bin reserved for garbage only, leaving it to the student monitors to fish the bags out and separate the contents.

“Some people are pigs and drop their whole bags in,” said 11-year-old Becky Freeman, a student monitor. “It gets kind of disgusting.”

But, she added, the majority of students abide by the recycling rules: “Most people are civilized that eat here.”