Pierpont kids turn green
Award recognizes school's environmental strides
By Bill Lascher 11/15/2007
Students at Pierpont Elementary School helped their alma mater win Ventura's first ever Green School Award. Mayor Carl Morehouse and Bill Camarillo, the chief executive officer of Ventura-based green waste recycler Agromin, bestowed the award on the school at a Nov. 14 assembly. Pierpont earned recognition for its recycling, waste-reduction, and composting efforts. It also won $500 cash donated by Agromin.
"They put in an outstanding application," said Christine Wied, Ventura's Environmental Services Coordinator.
"I noticed many, many schools doing lots of great things in terms of recycling and waste reduction," Wied said. "We really need to do things to recognize schools doing a great job."
Students at Pierpont were recognized for a number of efforts. In addition to recycling, teachers and administrators worked with students to reduce the amount of waste generated in the first place, from using smaller pieces of paper or both sides of a sheet to only taking the lunch items they thought they would eat. Some students are even working on composting some food waste for a garden complete with a worm bin. A few have even started bringing their own trays from home to use at the cafeteria instead of the school's Styrofoam trays, while others began taken lunch in reusable plastic containers instead of plastic bags. Additionally, the school is located near the beach. Each week students at Pierpont have a beach day, and once a month, each class is required to help clean up the beach.
"Those kinds of lessons that are going to be appropriate not just at school," Wied said. "We're building habits now that we think will pay off for the community as a whole."
Wied said that the award's timing (the school will also receive recognition at the Nov. 19 Ventura City Council meeting) coincides with America Recycles Day. To recognize that day, national organizations and sponsors have set up a recycling pledge on a Web site located at www.americarecyclesday.org.
But Pierpont's effort started long ago. Principal Larry Hardesty said volunteer parents, interested teachers, and the Kiwanis Club worked together to help get the school's community garden started four years ago. Last year the school started a recycling program, and the school is now working with trash hauler Harrison to try to figure out how to cut down on a strategy to cut down on lunchtime waste, mostly from disposable trays.
Hardesty credited second grade teacher Stacy Magdaleno, who wrote the school's application for the award, for many of Pierpont's green initiatives, including an after-school science club for second graders.
"She's really gung-ho about teaching the kids about not just environmental stuff and recycling, and how plants grow, that we're part of an ecosystem," Hardesty said. "For some kids, especially second graders, that's a pretty big stretch. At that level they're used to be waited on hands and foot."
Wied also came to the school, as well as others in the city, and ran classes for second and fourth graders to help them become aware of the environment and change ingrained habits.
"We're really trying to teach kids that we all have our own impact on the Earth," Hardesty said. "It's really neat to see teachers and kids and parents thinking about the choices that we make and how we affect the environment that we're living in."
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