Thanks to an Oak Harbor Education Foundation grant, Hillcrest Elementary is going green.
Last year, the school started a garden, in which students grew fruits and vegetables to donate to the North Whidbey Help House.
Starting in January, the students will begin to compost the food waste they create, as well.
“It will be nice for them to be able to see that their scraps can be turned back into something useful, like soil,” said Tristy Nielsen, a teacher involved in this new effort.
The school was awarded a grant to work toward composting the lunch waste to create soil they will use for their garden. The students will be assigned to collect data on how much waste they produce and the amount of composted soil created.
The grant will fund a cedar composting bin, pete moss to go over the composted soil to prevent smell and pests and a Chromebook to keep track of their collected data on a shared Google Drive.
The school already had a garden club, which many students participated in through their classes as a requirement, but now there will be a group of eight students on the Green Team. Those students filled out applications to be on the team, and they will act as go-betweens from the Green Team to the rest of the students.
Wade Applington and Trey Louis are two of the students chosen by their teacher Jodi Crimmins, who is another teacher on the Green Team.
The two were selected because of their responsibility and their ability to communicate, Crimmins said.
“It’s fun that we get to do composting and get more things for our garden,” Louis said.
“I care about all the green trees and plants and the community,” Applington said.
The Green Team has yet to hold its first meeting, but it’s already working on a plan to get started on the project.
“Anything that we meet about, any problems that we have, they’ll help problem solve,” Crimmins said of the students on the Green Team, “and they’ll be the voice of our meetings back to the students.”
Louis said that composting is important because otherwise, food is put “in the trash. Then it would go into the dumpster.
Then the dumpster would go into the dump, and then it would go into landfills.
“If we compost, (we can grow) more plants and we won’t have as much land fills,” Louis said, “and we also get to grow more than we usually do.”
Applington said that with composted soil, plants are also less likely to die.
“I’m not sure all kids understand that you can compost and make something out of waste that we create,” Nielsen said.
She said that when they started a recycling program, students learned a lot, and she hopes the composting program will do the same.
“They learned what they can recycle and what they can’t recycle, and now they can learn what they can compost and how they can do that without flies and without the smell and without rodents and pests,” Nielsen said.
“They’re going to learn some lifelong lessons, I think.”
