Educating Tomorrow

Who and what is the School Recycling Action Committee?

Coquille and I (Micki AKA mathjosi) are both crazy Oregon hippie chicks who came to NYC to find experience in the big city. Coming for a very green town of Eugene, Oregon, we were stunned and amazed by the amount of waste and lack of environmental awareness that we'd become accustomed to. Both NYC Teaching Fellows (me - teaching middle school math, she teaching bilingual elementary), we were horrified by the dismal sight of dirty old blue recycling bins in every classroom being used only for garbage, no thought or mention of recycling, littered cafeterias, hallways, and classrooms.... not to mention neighborhoods and students who found it common place to throw trash on the sidewalks, streets, on the floor, in the desks, and even out the window. We inspired each other to take on the volunteer role of recycling coordinator in addition to our demanding teacher duties in tough Brooklyn schools. I started and ran my program for two years in a shared building with two other schools, while she simultaneously did the same at her elementary school, which occupied her entire building. We shared ideas about how to work with our custodians, acquire the necessary bins, train our students with assemblies, held promotional contests, and contacted Sanitation constantly about the problems we were experiencing with their collection which is infrequent at best or sometimes doesn't happen for weeks on end while bags of recycables become litter all over the side walk and streets.

Finally we documented the whole process to present to New York City's Department of
Sanitation's Golden Apple Awards. You can see our proposals and all of the proposals of the other winners at this link. Her prize was $3,000. My prize $750. The difference: Her school occupies the entire building, while my school shared a building with two other schools. Currently, under their award guidelines, only entire buildings are eligible to win the Golden Apple Awards, even though the trend in the DOE is towards smaller schools sharing large buildings (like the three schools I've worked in).

So now that I've changed schools, I'm excited yet apprehensive to begin the process of starting another program. What we've learned through our individual school experiences is that training the kids, our job, is the easy part. Students want to do the right thing and eagerly participated in contests by writing songs, rap, poetry, and making posters. They also love to participate in collection, weighing, recording and graphing the results. But recycling is too much work for one teacher to do since the custodial staff and sanitation don't seem to be on board in this equation. We both experienced custodians throwing out the recyclable materials after students had so carefully sorted it, removed garbage, and bagged it up. We both spent countless hours on our personal cell phones repeatedly trying to get answers about how and when sanitation would pick our recyclables or to report missed collection that has sat on the curb, littering the sidewalk with paper for weeks on end.

This is an outrage and the biggest problem with recycling in this city! How can we hope to improve this situation if we don't educate the children: Educate Tomorrow!? How can we hope to educate the students so that they won't be swimming in a sea of all of our filth and surplus of needless, senseless waste if we can't train them to recycle in schools? Who is supposed to educate them to be stewards of th earth if not in SCHOOLS?? Why isn't anyone speaking up on this issue? Where are the voices? WE NEED TO AND MUST CRY OUT FOR JUSTICE! How hard is it to sort your waste, watch it, be accountable for it, look at it, problem solve ways to reduced, reuse, and recycle, take on personal responsibility for the good of all the living creature on the earth especially ourselves?? Yes, we are living in a selfish wasteful world and the ironic part is that we aren't even looking out for our own best interest because of it. How can we live our lives oblivious to and surrounded by trash? Just because we can't see it now, doesn't mean it's gone for good! Don't we deserve better for ourselves and our children. Why are the people in charge not doing their jobs to ensure a sound future on this planet? How can we sit by and let this happen knowingly right before our eyes and say nothing, do nothing? Isn't it our job as educators to take on the job of teaching the children how to behave and live in a world? How can we allow them to constantly litter their home where they live everyday with no though of where their garbage goes, what happens to it, what they need to do to make sure they take care of their only home: our plant. So that's why we formed this committee! We want to bring ANGRY/enthusiastic/passionate/feed-up teachers, students, parents, citizens of NYC and the World together to push, fight, argue, convince, and mostly GET ACTIVE about this issue in a BIG way. We want to hit the media with letters of disgust at this situations and a call for real change! How can we improve this machine of a city? How can we shape it's future?

What is the School Recycling Action Committee? IT'S YOU! It's your stage to air your concerns, thoughts, ideas, frustration, find common minds, plan together how to teach environmental stewardship, write letters, start a buzz and massive push in the city to WAKE UP, convince the people around you that it's not ok to just throw it all away! How can we rethink our city, so that we can help the children build the world of their future. NYC has had enough of the easy wasteful life of consuming and disposing thoughtlessly. Let's get together and shake things up! Let's take ACTION!

Email me mathjosi@yahoo.com, if you want to come to a meeting... or sign up on the listserve for www.recyclethisnyc.org, www.nycore.org, or www.educatingtomorrow.org

Mick Josi
NYC 6th Grade Math Teacher
MS 447 - Math & Science Exploratory School

"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead