Dryden’s Green Team increases sustainability

Two decades ago, Danny Fairchild, a retired fifth-grade teacher at Dryden Elementary School (DES), founded the DES Green Team, a student group that helps push sustainability efforts at the elementary school.

In Fairchild’s original grant proposals to the Dryden Youth Opportunity Fund, he described the group’s goals as to “educate our students in ways and means of making our planet a better place” and to “demonstrate to our district leaders that this project is sustainable.”

“Since then, it has definitely been a sustainable way for DES to do its part to help our environment by decreasing the amount of trash we send to the landfill,” said JoAnne Anderson, a reading teacher at DES and current Green Team adviser, in an email. “Students work to set up a system in the cafeteria and educate peers to separate lunch waste into compost, recycling and trash.”

Anderson started her role as Green Team adviser in 2014, and her co-adviser, Kate McKee, a second-grade classroom teacher at DES, joined her in 2019. Together, they lead a team of fourth- and fifth-graders through various sustainability efforts, including educating peers on separating lunch waste into trash, compost and recycling bins; collecting things like sneakers to be recycled; and learning more about the recycling process through field trips.

Local organizations like Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County and the Tompkins County Recycling and Materials Management Office, as well as school staff like custodians, have all helped with the Green Team’s efforts in the past.

In early 2020, prior to the pandemic, the Green Team presented many student-generated ideas to school administration, pitching moves like using fewer single-use, packaged items, using reusable trays and washable silverware and putting more recycling bins in the cafeteria. But within a month of that presentation, COVID-19 shut down in-person schooling and, with it, the Green Team’s meetings.

“When we went remote in March 2020, we were not able to uphold the Green Team for the rest of that school year,” Anderson said. “The 2020-21 school year brought many challenges to the Green Team. Most students only attended school two days a week. Students no longer ate in the cafeteria. They ate in their classrooms. Sustainable practices were affected, as we were not allowed to compost, lunches were all packaged to be delivered to classrooms, and the systematic routine that students were used to separating their lunches in the cafeteria went away.”

Because the pandemic drastically shifted what school life looks like at DES in the 2020-21 school year, the Green Team had to rethink its role at the school. McKee and Anderson started running the team via Google Classroom, helping to switch most of its activities to a virtual setting.

“Although we weren’t able to host in-person meetings, we held two fundraisers last year that were focused around reuse and recycling,” McKee said in an email. “First, we led a used shoe drive in the winter to collect shoes from the community to be recycled by the company Got Sneakers as a fundraiser. In the spring, we hosted a successful rummage sale to raise money and promote reuse in Dryden. We also won second place in a contest with TerraCycle where we won materials to build a new school garden.”

Thankfully, the 2021-22 school year has seen a significant shift back toward normalcy for the Green Team. In-person schooling means the group has gone back to in-person meetings, and lunch is once again being held in the cafeteria, which will allow the group’s usual sorting efforts to resume once cafeteria shifts are decided.

Even though the group has seen some relief this fall, COVID-19 is still a risk, so additional safety measures are being taken.

“We have always had the students working with safety measures in the cafeteria, but that is definitely heightened now,” McKee said. “Our food-service staff continues to work hard and needs to deliver food to some classrooms and use other systems to avoid everyone congregating like we did pre-COVID. That has made progress towards re-use in the cafeteria challenging. Also, it has been very hard for them to consistently get packaging due to supply chain shortages, so we are doing the best that we can with the current systems.”

The Green Team is focusing its efforts on other places at DES that may be easier to reduce waste, McKee said, like composting paper towels from bathrooms. The group has also maintained its partnership with TerraCycle to recycle materials that would otherwise be thrown away, she said, which include Solo cups, toothbrushes, K cups, markers, art materials and plastic packaging.

As much as the format of the Green Team has had to change, the students’ interest hasn’t wavered.

“There has always been good interest in joining the team, through the pandemic and all,” Anderson said. “When students join the Green Team, they fill out an application. One of the questions is ‘Why would you like to be part of the Green Team?’ Some of the answers from this year include ‘I want to help save the environment,’ ‘Taking care of the Earth is important,’ ‘I want to help keep the Earth clean,’ ‘I like to be helpful and environmentally responsible,’ ‘I want to help teach the younger kids’ [and] ‘I have ideas to share.’”

Anderson and McKee said that they’ve worked to keep the Green Team going because it’s an important program for DES and its students.

“Overall, keeping the group going forward each year is a huge success because it does help make sustainable practices a priority in our school and district,” McKee said. “We saw last year the importance of the Green Team, and it felt like a big success to keep it going even though it looked different. It is exciting to see the community getting involved and noticing the actions of our team as well.”

And that’s exactly why McKee and Anderson plan to keep the Green Team going for years to come. They said that each new group of students brings with them fresh ideas on more ways to increase the school’s sustainability efforts. To learn more about the Green Team, visit t.ly/yY6y.

In Brief:

DYOF fall grant applications due Oct. 31

The Dryden Youth Opportunity Fund (DYOF) is now accepting grant applications to be reviewed later this fall. Grant funds are awarded twice a year for the long-term benefit of Dryden area youth through innovative and creative programs and activities that go beyond the
basic requirements of public education. Projects should focus on cultural enrichment, academic achievement and general youth development.

For more information, or to download a grant application form, go to dyof.org or write to DYOF, P.O. Box 1076, Dryden, NY 13053.