Students from across region work to raise environmental awareness

Jummel Hidrosollo / Special to the Home News

From left, Ramen Khanna, Kallista Fay and Kirsten Keill participate in a recycle version of Twister at Cimarron-Memorial High School.

By Jenny Davis (contact)

Friday, Oct. 10, 2008 | midnight

Jummel Hidrosollo / Special to the Home News

Amanda Escalera takes part in the dumpster dive, where she sorts out recyclable material from a trash bin and takes them to the proper bins during a recycle event at Cimarron-Memorial High School.

Two years ago, members of the Earth Club at Cimarron-Memorial High School made a goal to bring the Clark County School District together to discuss recycling efforts. Sept. 29 marked the beginning of the realization of their goal.

The club planned five regional meetings from Sept. 29 to Oct. 9 to meet and share ideas with teachers, students and staff from across the school district, which will lead to one large district meeting Nov. 12, when representatives from each of the regional meetings will share information.

The focus of the recycling initiative is to get students and staff more environmentally aware so that recycling involvement among schools will increase and to create a district-wide network of people who will help each other create a uniform recycling program for the district.

At the first meeting, Sept. 29, representatives from four schools attended: Cimarron-Memorial, Desert Rose Adult High School, Liberty High School and William and Mary Scherkenbach Elementary School.

"The idea is to sit down to support each other and figure out why this is important," said Jennifer Newman-Cornell, who was the Earth Club advisor at Cimarron-Memorial the last couple of years before she began teaching at UNLV this year.

She decided to stay on board with recycling efforts, however, because she wanted to continue with the students who have worked hard over the last couple of years to bring the school district together.

"This is what we've been working for: uniting the School District, this is it," she said.

Chris Kindred, a teacher at Desert Rose who attended the meeting, said the principal has a plan this year: Desert Rose goes Desert Green. The adult high school doesn't have a recycling program, but because Kindred previously taught at Cimarron-Memorial, he took the initiative of going to the meeting.

"I know who to talk to. Cimarron-Memorial has done a good job with their recycling effort because starting is very difficult," he said. "So instead of doing all the research and burning the midnight oil, I thought I'd come down here and talk to Jennifer (Newman-Cornell), who has already done all the research. No sense in reinventing the wheel."

Louise Ruskamp, a teacher at Scherkenbach, said she came because although the school has bins to recycle cardboard, plastic bottles, cans and paper, it is trying to increase recycling efforts.

"We'd like to have boxes in each classroom, but we don't have anything like that right now," she said.

Ruskamp said she hopes that soon there will be a district-wide recycling program, because now it is difficult to know what to do and to know where to put bins for paper for 1,000 kids.

"Las Vegas is not a recycling town. It needs to be," she said. "We need to focus on the younger generation."

On Sept. 29, Cimarron-Memorial also sent out a newsletter to every school in the School District about the meetings with information about who to contact about recycling at the different schools.

Cimarron-Memorial's DVD, "Recycling Rocks," a 10-minute video about how to start a recycling program at the school, was also sent out.

The making of the video was inspired after Cimarron-Memorial's Earth Club received $2,000 from the "Keys to Innovation" contest, a program supported by Lexus and Grammy award-winning singer Alicia Keys for schools that have environmental programs. In May, the club got to meet Keys. The school is now in a national contest for $10,000, but Newman-Cornell said she didn't know when the winner would be announced. Nine other schools across the country are possible winners of the reward.

During the first regional meeting, students (mostly from Cimarron-Memorial) learned more about recycling by participating in 10 activities. The activities ranged from playing a "Jeopardy" game based on recycling and Dumpster diving, where participants raced to empty their trash cans the fastest by taking the trash out of the bins and running over to four designated trash bins marked aluminum, plastic, paper/cardboard or trash and separating the trash.

"Recycling is a good thing," said Robert Jeffries, a junior and member of the Cimarron-Memorial Earth Club, who organized the Dumpster diving activity. "I started recycling at my friend's house because we kill 24 cans of soda in a weekend."

One of the difficulties the district has in having a district-wide recycling program is finding a recycling company that will pick up co-mingled material for the entire district. With the price of gas and a slowing economy, it is difficult to make money in recycling, so recycling companies don't stick around long, said Mike McGrath, who works in purchasing for Cimarron-Memorial.

Cimarron-Memorial, along with several other schools from the School Sistrict, is using Secured Fibres to pick up the schools' co-mingled recyclable items. The schools don't pay Secured Fibres for picking up the recyclable material, and the company doesn't pay the schools from the money it receives for the recycled material.

"The school isn't into recycling to make money," McGrath said. "It's because it's the right thing to do."

If the pilot program goes well, McGrath said it is possible that Secured Fibres could be contracted to do the same thing for the entire School District.

"It's getting better: slowly but surely," he said.

Jenny Davis can be reached at 990-8921 or jenny.davis@hbcpub.com.