Commentary: Green and growing at Chautauqua Elementary

What can you do at your house to be more green?

Close your eyes. Imagine waking up to the smell of rotten eggs. You look out your window to the sight of smog and piles of plastic. The sound of honking horns overtakes the chirping birds that you once heard. You’re living on an island of trash.

Students and teachers at Chautauqua Elementary School are working to keep Vashon from becoming an island of trash through a group they created called Green Team, started in 2013 to raise awareness for keeping the earth clean and putting action into saving the earth for future generations.

After many years of hard work, Green Team recently earned three awards from the King County Green Schools Program. The first is the Organics Collection Award. After lunch, all students sort their trash and food waste into separate bins. Then, we donate the food scraps to the pigs that live on the farm of a student who attends Chautauqua. We showed students a video of the pigs so they know where their scraps are going, and we also bought “grabbers” to help make sure all things are in the correct bin.

The second award is the Food Waste Reduction Award. Our lunch room has a “share table” where we put unopened and uneaten food like applesauce, apples, string cheese, and milk for others to eat instead of throwing it away. We also had packages of cranberries that nobody ate and we don’t serve them anymore because it made food waste.

The third award we earned is the Waste Reduction Award. The Green Team used a grant to buy sets of reusable plates, cups, bowls, and silverware for every classroom. On holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day, trash cans would normally be overflowing with garbage from the parties. Now, teachers use these sets for parties or other activities and just wash and reuse them.

Many adults and children from past Green Teams have put effort into winning these three awards. We would like to recognize some of the adults who have helped make this happen: Amy Bogaard, Tara Brenno, Kelly Fox, Manda McCoy, Sunder Michelle, Jill Hereford, and the current Green Team leaders Shanon Brown and Margie Butcher.

The Green Team currently has 29 members. We think about different problems with the earth, how people overuse resources, and how we can help. We go to classrooms several times a year and teach kids about the earth and how they can help, too. We also do a big event once a year on Earth Day with different stations — such as reading books about the earth, creating art with recycled bottle caps, painting murals for the school, playing a game called “Orcas and Salmon” with fun facts about them, and weeding the school garden to get it ready for planting. A lot of effort goes into making our school environmentally friendly.

I love Green Team for many reasons. One is because it helps the earth. Have you ever seen pieces of trash on the ground and not picked them up? Or seen a wild animal like a squirrel eating trash or old food off the ground? These problems are because of humans, and we are the only ones who can fix them. Another reason I love Green Team is because it teaches responsibility — it gets us thinking about more than just ourselves, and how to inform other people about problems and causes.

I think Green Team has helped our school in many ways, and in the next few years it will continue to grow new ideas to help the earth and earn more awards.

What can you do at your house to be more green? You could compost food waste, start a garden, or even better, join Chautauqua’s Green Team and volunteer once a week in our school garden next school year.

Blake Smith is a fourth-grade student at Chautauqua Elementary School and a member of the school’s Green Team.