Sprouts of Hope: Jane Goodall Visits King Open

Celebrating Composting with Dr. Jane

By Eliza and Risa

This May, after a long, tiring Roots & Shoots-filled spring, the Sprouts of Hope participated in yet another exciting event with Dr. Jane Goodall -- an event that took place at our school!

Dr. Jane Goodall came to King Open, the Sprouts of Hope greeted her outside and showed her the murals the King Open community has painted. (You can see Risa with Dr. Jane in this photograph.) One of them is about immigrants who've come to Cambridge; the two other ones are at our school’s entrance. One is a replica of the Sistine Chapel, but with people from King Open painted on it, and the other shows Dr. Martin Luther King, with our school's name on it, too.

Then Dr. Jane went into the auditorium, where she greeted students with a pant hoot. Kids responded and it seemed like they were having a lot of fun.

She came to our school to congratulate us on a very successful year of composting. King Open’s composting program, which the Sprouts of Hope helped to start a little over a year ago, has saved more than 13,000 pounds of food waste that otherwise would’ve been dumped into a landfill!

Dr. Jane not only congratulated students at King Open for saving the planet, but she also came to our school to spread the word about composting. At the whole-school assembly where she spoke, she encouraged other schools to start composting – and since the mayor of Cambridge, the superintendent of schools, and some school committee members were at the assembly, we are hoping that her message (and ours!) will make a difference.

At the assembly, Dr. Jane spoke a little bit about her life, as well as the Jane Goodall Institute, Tacare, and Roots & Shoots. She encouraged students to get involved. Her message to us was that simple things – like composting our school lunches – make a difference. As she always says: “Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference!”

Four students – ranging from kindergarden to fourth grade – demonstrated for Dr. Jane how composting works in our cafeteria. It was a fun to watch, even though the kids got in the wrong order and some compost went in the trash!

Our science teacher, Donna Peruzzi, led the Q & A with Jane Goodall. Microphones were passed through the crowd and kids asked questions such as “What do chimpanzees eat?"

It was really special to have Dr. Jane come to King Open. Here is what Anne Driscoll wrote about her visit to our school in Tonic.com:

"The five girls who belong to Sprouts of Hope Roots & Shoots group had lobbied the Cambridge School Committee and the school superintendent to create a conservation plan and install special composting bins in the King Open School cafeteria. The group hopes to expand the program and replicate it at other schools.

In addition to the six and a half tons of garbage saved from a landfill, their composting program also prevented the release of additional methane gas, which becomes 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a green house gas. Besides, Goodall says it's the small efforts now that pay off big dividends later.

"You can't expect a child to suddenly become involved in everything," Goodall was quoted as telling the King Open students. "You have to start somewhere."

We gave Dr. Jane a King Open shirt. We hope she remembers her visit at our school as much as we remember having her with us that day. It meant so much to us that she took time from her busy schedule to come to King Open and congratulate us on our efforts to compost.

To read more about Dr. Jane's visit to our school, you can click on these links:

• http://tinyurl.com/27xnmoq
• http://tinyurl.com/2ek9grg
• http://tinyurl.com/2f2esnk

Sprouts of Hope: Greening Our School

Composting Gets Launched at King Open

By Maya

Two years ago the Sprouts of Hope, a Roots & Shoots group in Cambridge, MA, went to city's school committee to tell them why we thought we should stop having to use polystyrene lunch trays at our school. The members of the committee seemed very interested and listened to what we had to say. We wrote them a thank you note to tell them how much we appreciated them listening to our ideas and asked them again about changing the trays. About a month later, we went back to talk to them again -- and this time we read our thank you note --and then they passed a motion to require the superintendent to look for environmentally friendly alternatives to how we were using the trays in our cafeteria.

The Superintendent created a committee that looked at all the different possibilities -- from using dishwashers in each school to wash reuseable trays to purchasing ones that would be able to turn into compost. After looking at price of compostable trays and evaluating the other options by how they would affect the environment, the committee decided to start a pilot composting program for food waste at our schools. When our school shows that it works, they will start to teach other schools how to do it, and eventually the idea is to be able to eat off of the kind of trays and use the kind of spoons and forks that we can also throw into the compost barrel.

To prepare for the composing program we had meetings after school on Thursdays. Two of the Sprouts of Hope -- Kaya and me -- were able to go to all the meetings, and some of the others went to some of them when they didn't have other activities. There were also three other kids from the afterschool environmental program called Cambridge Can, and one of the custodians at the school who has been helping us with our Waste Free Lunch days.

Here's a picture of two of the Cambridge Can members on our first day of composting.

Our science teacher Donna Peruzzi was always there to help us come up with ideas for how to get other kids really excited about the program. And here's a picture of her using the compost barrel in the cafeteria.

And we worked with Meryl Brott, who is the new recycling director for the city of Cambridge. Then, there was Randi Mail, who directs the city's Department of Public Works, and Jim Maloney, the COO for the Cambridge School Department. At some meetings, people like Jack Mingle, who heads the Cambridge schools' food department, and Jose Wendel and Dawn Olcott from the Cambridge Health Alliance joined us.

You can see pictures of Randi, below on the right, and Meryl, on the left, when they were helping us to do the composting that first day.

It was cool to think that because of what the Sprouts of Hope and two other kids from King Open had said to the school committee, we were now meeting with adults who are in charge of big departments in the school and in the city. And they were asking us for ideas about how to make this happen at our school!!! At one point they asked us to come up with an idea for a composting mascot, and so we talked about it, and then one day I did a pencil drawing of a worm wrapped around an apple core. I sketched the design and gave it to Jack Mingle one night when we went back this fall to talk with the Cambridge School Committee about the composting effort He said he liked it, and before I knew they'd taken my design and made it a cartoon-like mascot!!!

To get every one to feel excited about being the first kids in the city to do a composting program at a school, we planned to do two assemblies; one would be for kids from kindergarten to the 4th grade and the other for 5-8th graders. We planned them for the morning of the day when composting would begin -- our hope was to let all of the kids know what composting is, why it matters that we do it, and how to do it. Then we felt like it was really important to find ways to inspire them to want to do it.

During the assemblies Meryl Brott spoke about how it would work in the cafeteria and she did a great job of explaining how composting helps the environment. (It keeps a lot of waste out of landfills, and when food is put into landfills it gets buried in lots of trash and gives off methane gas which is really bad for global warming.) You can watch a movie we made about the day, and it shows how Meryl explained how composting helps animals -- and the kids loved seeing the animals on the screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLuD1B3k8g4

The younger kids got to see a slide show that the Sprouts of Hope had made of students at King Open bringing eco-friendly containers and recycling their polystyrene trays during Waste Free Lunch days on days when we tried doing them at our school.

They also got to see Meryl and Randi do a demonstration of how to compost. For the older kids, after Meryl spoke, we showed a fun video that the Cambridge Can kids (you saw Eve and Brianna's picture earlier in the blog entry) made about all the trash we throw away at King Open and showed how easily we could reduce it and why it matters that we do. Next we played an inspiring “Yes We Can” video of President Obama speaking and singers performing that was put together by Will.I.Am. You can watch have fun watching it, too, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

After that video played, a picture of “Martin Luther King” came up on the screen and a student, in voice that sounded a bit like his, gave us a message about how proud he was of us for doing something to make a positive difference in the world. (You can hear this on the YouTube movie, too.)

At lunch that day we became the first school in Cambridge to compost at school, and it went REALLY, REALLY well!!!! There were banners and posters in the cafeteria and notices were sent home to let families know it was happening.

The kids poured their liquids into the white bucket, and they put their food into the yellow bucket, trash into the black barrel, and their tray into a big bag that will take them to the place where they get recycled.

Everyone got a sticker saying, “I compost my school lunch because I care.”

We had student monitors who'd been trained to help other students and they got to wear aprons with our mascot on the front. They gave the kids good hints about how to put their waste in the right buckets. My mom took pictures and videos of the kids composting and saying how excited they are about doing this! When you watch the YouTube video about our first day -- you can find the link above -- and you'll get a good sense of how excited everyone was about doing the composting.

I knew that it would go well because the grown-ups in our school -- like Principal Tim -- and those from other places like the Department of Public Works helped us to be sure it did. But I didn’t think that it would go that well!! And Principal Tim said at our assembly how kids can be the ones who have good ideas and why it's important for grown-ups to listen to their ideas and find ways to help to make them happen. This is what happened with this idea -- since it started with kids talking about replacing the trays and ended up with us doing composting as a first step.

Here is a link to a Cambridge Chroncle article about the composting effort at King Open and it tells about how the Sprouts of Hope were involved in making it happen:

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/education/x1098980048/Cambridge-school-aims-to-be-greenest-in-Boston-area

I hope the spirit of composting doesn’t go away so that our pilot program will go smoothly throughout the year. When that happens, then we know it will work at other schools in the future! And when it works at other schools, too, we will be that much closer to being able to replace the polystyrene trays with ones we can toss into the compost -- and that will be a very happy day, too!!

We've also learned that some kids at the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, our city's high school, have started a Compost Club. From March 2nd through March 6th, some of the club's members, such as Jonah Vorspan-Stein and Eliza Cohen, who went to King Open, moved from table to table to collect food scraps and paper waste. While doing so, they explained to students how composting works and why it's important to do. A story in the school's newspaper says within a year the Compost Club hopes to establish permanent compost bins in the cafeteria and do more trial weeks of composting in the meantime. It also says that the club hopes to have assemblies and presentations about composting. We say "Go For It," and we hope it happens soon at your school, too.