BY PETE WICKLUND
Journal Times | Posted: Monday, March 17, 2008 12:00 am
RACINE - Sometimes you need a visual aid to help make your point. To make her point to the Racine Unified School Board Tuesday night, Annette Terselic brought in a few bags of lunchroom trash.
To clarify, Terselic brought in several bags of aluminum and plastic trays used to serve lunch at district elementary schools. Terselic's concern is that at most Unified elementary buildings those trays are each day going into the trash when they could, and she believes should, be
recycled.
Terselic estimates that district-wide, 6,347 of the aluminum trays go into the trash each day. Multiply that by five and it equals 31,735 trays per week. Multiply that by 36 weeks of school in an academic year and that would amount to more than 1.14 million aluminum trays. Add the plastic trays and the total number more than doubles, she says.
To better visualize Terselic's contention, she says all the trays collected from the district's elementary schools for one week would surpass the height of the retractable roof at Miller Park.
Terselic, a teacher at Walden School, says that not only is keeping the trays out of landfills the environmentally friendly thing to do, it is also the law. So, with the help of her Walden colleagues, Terselic has been lobbying the district for most of this school year to separate the trays from the rest of the lunchroom trash and recycle them. She has contacted area scrap haulers about collecting or receiving the aluminum trays and says the plastic trays should be able to be picked up by the district's contracted waste haulers.
Jack Parker, Unified's interim superintendent, said district officials have been researching how the district's contracted services will handle the collection before making it a district policy. But as far as School Board President Tony Baumgardt is concerned, the sooner the better.
"I think the process has taken the district a little longer than folks had hoped, but I think it's definitely something we should be doing," Baumgardt said following Monday's School Board meeting. "I'm looking forward to district administration making something happen."
Terselic says based on her observations at Jefferson Lighthouse School, where she ran some experiments last week, students are receptive to the idea.
"The kids are really excited about it," Terselic said. "We preach to our kids about all the things going wrong (environmentally) in the world. We should be giving them something they can do about it."
The district already has a successful pilot program of sorts at Red Apple Elementary, where under the guidance of art teacher Jeff Ruggaber, students have already recycled 300 pounds of plastic trays as of Monday and 126 pounds of aluminum trays since the start of the school year.
Ruggaber said the students have adopted the recycling program as their own so that he does not need to worry if he should be gone for a day.
The program not only teaches the kids about the environment, Ruggaber said, it gives students opportunities for math learning when they calculate how many trays are needed to reach the height of various marker goals like Miller Park and the Statue of Liberty.
A couple of side benefits also result from the recycling effort at Red Apple. First, there are fewer lunch trash bags each day, which makes the school's custodial staff happy. And there is also the little bit of money generated from the sale of aluminum that goes toward the school garden club.
In addition to the program at Red Apple, Terselic received some inspiration from recycling efforts at a non-Unified school, Racine Montessori, which Terselic's children attend.
Rita Lewis, administrator of Racine Montessori, said the school strongly emphasizes trash reduction, including encouraging students to bring lunch in brown sacks and reusable containers.
"The children feel deeply about it (recycling) and then it gets to the parents," Lewis said. "One of our program focuses is on care of the Earth."