Newtown’s Disposables Exposed By Reed School Students

By Susan Coney

What initially began as a simple lesson on the environment for sixth grade teacher Todd Stentiford’s class quickly evolved into an intensive unit of study, which has encompassed a wide range of learning experiences.

Mr Stentiford teaches science and language arts at Reed Intermediate School, and with the help of his teaching partner, math and social studies teacher Tim McGuire, guided students in an in-depth study of the environment.

A brainstorming session in Mr Stentiford’s science class generated questions the students were interested in researching. “Our class was studying the environment and then narrowed the topic down to waste at our school,” said Mr Stentiford. “Someone mentioned how wasteful it was to use disposable lunch trays and that’s the path of study we followed,” he said.

Once his students’ interests were piqued, Mr Stentiford provided the sixth graders with a list of websites where they could do further investigative work on the negative impact disposable lunch trays have on the environment. The children learned that the lunch trays were made of polystyrene.

After conducting research the students became very concerned and decided to write letters to Joe LaChance, director of food services for Chartwells, the food service company that provides the entire lunch program for all of Newtown’s schools. The class objective is to persuade Mr LaChance to change over and use washable trays.

Sixth grader Evelyn Fahey said, “I didn’t know that polystyrene wasn’t biodegradable. We use so much polystyrene that we don’t even realize it.” She went on to say that other states such as Maine recycle polystyrene and use it as insulation and stuffing for beanbag chairs.

Student Jane Ellen Anderson said in her letter, “There are 2.9 billion pounds of polystyrene in landfills around the world. That’s a lot, considering that polystyrene is 95 percent air. Our school alone is producing so much waste in one year. We use 300 polystyrene lunch trays every day, sometimes even more. After 182 days of school, we use approximately 54,600 trays.” She concluded her letter: “Think about it this way; if everyone keeps using as much polystyrene as they have been for the next few hundred years, the earth won’t be healthy enough to grow those great fruits and veggies that you like to serve us.”

Sixth grader Joshua Volpe wrote, “In this school, as you may know, we have had a dish washing facility since the day this school opened; not once have we used it to clean a student’s tray! If we don’t use this machine then that is another $16,892.51 (the price of the Hobart CRS66A-361 Conveyer Dishwasher) down the drain.” Student Brandon Weiner added in his letter, “Why would we spend over $16,000 on an industrial dishwasher if were just going to spend even more money to buy polystyrene trays over and over again?”

Abhinav Tyagarajan, a sixth grader, provided Mr LaChance with a mathematical breakdown of the cost effectiveness of using reusable trays as opposed to the polystyrene ones. A small portion of his argument went as follows, “If we switch to plastic trays we would save about $2,700 per year! Wow! In fact if we had started using plastic trays when this school had opened we would have saved about $8,100.”

The students recently completed their letters to Mr LaChance and are hoping that he will consider what they have to say and eliminate the use of disposable trays in all of the Newtown schools.

Another outcome of studying the unit on the environment was that the more the students learned, the more they wanted to know about pollution in and around Newtown. Independently a group of approximately 15 students arranged to pick up litter around the Newtown area. The team divided Newtown into regions — southeast, northeast, southwest, and northwest — and small groups of students went out for a brief time to pick up litter.

In a short period of time the students collected several large trash bags filled of litter from their designated regions. A second litter collection was done at Reed school, where the entire cluster of students went out for a short time to gather litter on the school grounds. Sixth grader Abhinav Tyagarajan said, “I was shocked at how much litter we collected in such a short time.”

The students collected more than 92 pounds of litter in the joint effort to clean up the Newtown environment. Bringing the large bags of litter into the classroom, the students began to sort the litter. It was grouped and categorized by type such as plastic, polystyrene, metal, wood, fabric, and other. The most unusual items found were dental molds.

The students in Mr Stentiford and Mr McGuire’s class became enraged at how careless people in their own community are about properly disposing of litter. This sparked another offshoot of their study and encouraged the students to ask, “Where does all the garbage and polystyrene go?”

Upon doing further research the sixth graders learned that trash and recycled items first go to the Newtown Transfer Station, where it is sorted, and then ends up at the RESCO incinerator in Bridgeport.

The students wrote persuasive letters to Principal Donna Denniston and Assistant Principal Tony Salvatore requesting that they be allowed to take a field trip to the Newtown Transfer Station and the RESCO incinerator. In order to take a field trip it must tie in with the school curriculum and the students went so far as to find sections in the Expected Performances column in the Core Themes, Content Standards and Expected Performances guide to help justify the trip.

 The students found specific sections, which are applicable to what sixth graders are required to learn, such as how human activity impacts water resources. The students also found section C7, which states that sixth graders will learn about the effects of heating on the movement of molecules in solids, which ties in the visit to the incinerator in Bridgeport.

Jane Ellen Anderson wrote, “What I want to do is go on two original, exciting field trips to the Newtown Transfer Station and the RESCO incinerator in Bridgeport. I would remember it for the rest of my life! And it would be exciting, too. After all, it would feel great knowing that my classmates and I made a difference just by collecting trash and taking it down the street [referring to the Newtown transfer station]. It’s a simple act of citizenship that we want to do.”

The persuasive letters requesting permission to take the field trip were successful and the students are looking forward to the upcoming visit. They are anxiously awaiting a response from Mr LaChance regarding the use of polystyrene trays in the Newtown schools.

Incorporating all the core subjects, reading, writing, science, and math what began as a regular lesson on the environment turned into a deeply meaningful and comprehensive learning experience that all of Mr Stentiford’s and Mr McGuire’s students are sure to remember.