Eco-leaders garner national attention, look to future
Ramona High School teacher Gloria Quinn and her student eco-leaders recently received a President’s Environmental Youth Award for their work recycling food scraps from each school in the district.
The eco-leaders had applied to be a part of the national Food Recovery Challenge, submitting for recognition the food-waste reduction and composting program they began on campus.
Every day the eco-leaders gather the food scraps. They weigh the food collected and deposit it into the 600-gallon Earth Tub composting system. They then record the data, check the Earth Tub’s temperature and operate the unit.
“They’re here every day and they’re enthusiastically doing this every day,” Quinn said before school ended for the year. “Cloudy, sprinkling, they’re out there doing this.”
The compost produced is then used in the class garden or sold.
It is a many-tiered effort, Quinn noted, one that could not run without the collaboration of multiple people, such as the school’s kitchen workers, the drivers who transport the compost and the student eco-leaders.
“They’re all the unsung heroes of this,” said Quinn. “If anybody there stops, it all stops. It’s a job that happens every day because people know that they are doing something for the greater good.”
The eco-leaders have kept 11 tons worth of food out of the landfill and reduced their environmental footprint in such a way that it is as though they’ve kept four vehicles off the road for a year. A conservative estimate of cost benefit to the school district is at least $18,000, Quinn noted.
The class also received certification allowing them to use their crops as a culinary garden. Because of this, students are allowed to take their choice of the harvest home to make meals and learn valuable culinary skills.
Encouraged by the recognitions they’ve received, Quinn and the eco-leaders are generating plans to expand their efforts.
They hope to some day feed the entire Ramona High student body their produce, but they will need more work space to do so. The students think a new greenhouse would be just the thing to help.
The eco-leaders put together a math project to calculate how well the addition of a greenhouse would advance their production. In this project, they measured the necessary space, determined the square footage and calculated the cost of the operation. They also determined how many tables and how many trays they would need.
“They even did a whole presentation on this as if this was their proposed plan and then did a whole write-up on the whole process,” said Quinn.
Along with building a new greenhouse, the eco-leaders influence would be expanded with the installment of the new kitchen they found on craigslist at no cost to the school. All it the kitchen needs is someone to help finish the granite.
Not only has the work of the eco-leaders helped better the environment, but it has also helped them meet the Common Core state standards as well as all 12 elements in the state’s standards for Career Ready Practice.
“I love being able to take what our standards are because they really do apply to real life lessons and real life scenarios that give us meaning, that give us purpose, that connect us with our community,” Quinn said. “When you can join those together, that’s when it has that meaning and that’s what we’re doing in here with all of these things and they are making a difference not just in the community but in the world.”