NY Post article on Recycling

Here is the letter I submitted to the NY Post after their article on recycling, or lack thereof, in NYC schools:

Thanks to the Post for your article on the lack of recycling in schools. As a teacher in the NYC DOE, I face this problem everyday. I started and ran a recycling program in Brooklyn for 2 years. It was no easy task.

The first issue is acquiring supplies: real garbage bins (not dirty recycling bins), and new and clean recycling bins, large clear bags, plastic gloves, and wheeled collection bin for each floor. We received a grant for $1,500 from Donors Choose for these. Decals, posters, curriculum, and videos came from the Department of Sanitation, who also awarded our program $1,500 for their Golden Apple Awards.

The next is collection. Students participate eagerly, but without a supportive infrastructure, the collection is either thrown out by custodians or not collected by Sanitation (we experienced both). Realistically, each school building needs a trained professional whose sole responsibility is to see that recycling codes are followed.

We are, after all, in the business of educating the future. We are mis-educating them, if the teaching of recycling isn’t on the bill. I want to rally support for a massive recycling initiative in this city. Please contact me by enlisting with Recycle THIS!.

Letter To Klein

Here's an idea... what if everyone (parents, teacher, students, and the public at large) wrote their own passion letter to Chancellor Klein to persuade him to pay attention to recycling in schools and take action. Why not submit your 350 words or less letter to Klein now?

Here's the letter I wrote:

I am a math teacher in my 6th year working for the DOE in NYC. I became aware of the recycling problem when I saw old dirty recycling bins used as garbage cans throughout the building and every DOE school building I've been in since that first day. So frustrated and bothered by this situation, in 2004, I started a school-wide recycling program at my school, I.S. 33, with a grant for $1,500 from Donors Choose to buy new bins, and garbage bins for each classroom, bottle containers for cafeteria, main office, and teachers lounge, collection bags, gloves, and wheeled containers. I acquired training materials from the Sanitation Department and conducted assemblies to the student body. I recruited student volunteers to collect the recyclables. We experienced many problems including, custodians throwing away recyclables, cafeteria staff not recycling properly, and the Department of Sanitation not coming to pick up the curbside recycling for weeks on end.

I wrote the award submission for the Golden Apple Awards and received honorable mention, since ours was one out of 3 schools in the building recycling. Only a handful of schools participate in this contest since it's clear that very few schools have recycling programs. Because of lack of an infrastructure to support my efforts or any type of compensation for my tremendous efforts, I have little motivation to take on such a burdensome task in the future. I was inspired by the NY Post's article on the school recycling situation.

The DOE has a big job to undertake in order to abide by your own regulation with regards to school recycling. But we are in the business of educating the future, yet we are mis-educating them, if the teaching of recycling isn't on the bill. I want to rally support for a massive recycling initiative in this city. I'm forming a group to take action and am asking for your support and assistance with this matter.

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage

Watch the video on-line:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/11/22/gone-tomorrow-the-hidden-life-of-garbage-video/

How to start a school recycling program?

Do you often find yourself uttering this very question?

Well here's how I did it:

Step 1. Request necessary publications, decals, poster, videos, coloring books, magnets, etc from the NYC Department of Sanitation. http://www.nyc.gov/recycle

Step 2: Replace old dirty blue recycling bins that are coated with trash from their many years serving as garbage bins in teh school with real garbage bins and sparkling new blue recycling bins for paper only in every classroom. This cost $1,500 for a school with 4 floors and approximately 500 students grades 6 - 8. I wrote and we receive a grant from http://www.donorschoose.org. The grant also paid for large CLEAR (not blue) collection bags, a wheeled collection bin for each floor, bottle collection bins for the cafeterias and main office, and sanitary gloves for the kids to collect with.

Step 3: Train your community and work out collection issues. Department of Sanitation provides the training videos. Simply organize an assembly and then recruit kids to help collect. They will eagerly volunteer. Figure out a time during the week for them to collect from each classroom. You have to really butter up your custodial staff so that they will leave the recycling alone (otherwise it might get thrown out). I had an after-school club of kids would collected the paper and bottles, weighed it, graphed it, and finally used a huge rolling bin to take the paper out to the curb the night before "collection." I put collection in quotes because I could never get a clear answer on when that collection was and our recyclables would sometimes sit for weeks on end out side the school until papers slip open and littered the streets. We'd call repeatedly and many times the excuse was that we weren't allowed to use blue bags (which we used at first since they were left over). This right here is to me the largest issue about having a program... there isn't an infrastructure in the city or the DOE to support a culture of recycling. It's a mind-set and a value system that must be taught in school in order for it change anything on a large scale.

Step 4: Promote the program by having a recycling poster making contest and offering a cash prize for the winner. Hang the posters in the lobby and ask teachers to vote on their favorites with a ballot box in the main office.

Step 5: Monitor the progress of students and staff. Students should keep a log when collecting and document the amount of paper in the bins and any garbage found in bins. Teachers with garbage in their bins will be issued a summons for $1 to support the recycling program. Students can write up the summons at the club meeting after-school too.

Step 6: Apply for the Sanitation Department's Golden Apple Awards by taking pictures and documenting your program. http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/recycling_schools.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/recycling_schools.shtml . We won honorable mention for our program since our entire building wasn't recycling. We shared the building with three other schools, which made our school ineligible for any prize other than honorable mention. Another flaw of the

Step 7: Celebrate by distributing t-shirts, award certificates, prizes, and cake to all of the students that participated in the poster making contest and the recycling team all year.

Do you have any additional ideas or resources? I'd love to take a trip to MRF. They show one on the sanitation videos and kids asked to go see one, but as far as I know, you can't.

City Limits Article: THE TRASHMAN COMETH: TOWARD A WASTE-FREE CITY

City Limits Article: THE TRASHMAN COMETH: TOWARD A WASTE-FREE CITY

Here's another great article on NYC Recycling by City Limits.

http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=3294

NYCSRAC First Meeting Minutes

Last night a few of us braved the cold, rain, noise and crowds to meet up at the Village Pour House for our School Recycling Action Committee Meeting.

We had a huge table in the back, but it was super noisy and almost impossible to hear people. Seven people were in attendance: Coquille, Chong, Dave, Micki, Sarah, John, and Marie. We tried our best to discuss the issues at our schools and the individual interests. Coquille shared NYC RRR curriculum kit from the Department of Sanitation (order one for yourself), her Golden Apple Award binder, and copies of the Post article and the NYC DOE regulations on recycling, which states that all schools are required by law to recycle and must set up a recycling program by assigning recycling coordinators at every level: All DOE offices and schools. We know these regulations are not be followed or enforced! You can see the copies at Educating Tomorrow look under groups and then NYC School Recycling blog. We we will be this Group to post ideas about actions we can all be taking in our schools and on our computers to push our schools and the HUGE DOE to do it's job and start recycling programs.

Chong shared his work with Soul Survivors Inc. on composting programs in the city and the possibility of working with schools to institute compost training and worm bins. He is also working on the creative end on comic strips and educational materials for kids on composting. Micki expressed her interest in working with him specifically on training kids at her school since she is starting a unit of study on waste, garbage and recycling. Compost would be an excellent addition to unit and could be a very cool way to learn math and science!

Dave shared his interest in starting a recycling program for environmental and educational reasons, and Micki and Dave decided to work together to start a recycling program at their school as part of their exploration day curriculum in the 6th and 7th grade. Micki discussed the issues she experienced starting a recycling program at her old school. She also discussed an article from City Limits the great resource, documentary, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.

Sarah and John shared about their school's lack of recycling program. John shared a few ideas of better venues for our meetings. I guess I should have written down the names, but he will be emailing them to me.

As we get ready for our next meeting, Chong had the great idea of focusing on creating a Media Kit on this issue. He'd like to form a Think Tank to tackle the creation of a kit that will bring more attention to this issue. At our next meeting, we will focus on what will go in our kit and how we can share in its creation.

In the meantime, SPREAD THE WORD! Sign up with this Group and share it with your friend. Power in numbers! Our next meeting will be in December. If you have suggestions about a good venue, let us know!

Coquille and I are planning to attend the Radical Teachers meeting at Bluestocking at 2:30pm this Sunday. If you are interested, try to come to the meeting and/or email me when a convenient day/time for you to meet up is and do you have any ideas on a place that would be large enough, less crowded, quiet and GREEN? Maybe Bluestocking is a good choice. I'll try to talk to them about their space and time options.

Talk to you soon,

Micki

P.S. To stay connected to this issue join our GROUP: Educating Tomorrow. Click Groups, then NYC Schools Recycling to communicate about ideas, questions, and meetings... but also, we'll use RecycleThis.org and NYCoRE to send out announcements and meetings too... so you will be covered if you are on either list.

Who and what is the School Recycling Action Committee

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. If we live our lives oblivious to and surrounded by trash isn't it because we ourselves feel like trash, how can we not? 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. Do I sound like a left-wind lunatic.... all earthy, peace, hippie-chick??!! Good, then I'm doing my job... but still, be real, isn't it all the truth? So that's why we formed this committee! We want to bring ANGRY 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