Recycling a new kind of learning

Grant awarded to two Burbank schools will emphasize conservation and environmental issues in the classroom.BURBANK -- The Burbank Unified School District has officially earned the title of Environmental Ambassador, capping off two years of training that promoted recycling.

Two of the district’s schools, John Burroughs High School and John Muir Middle School, were given grants to promote environmental programs within the school in 2003. Now that the program has concluded, the recycling measures the schools adopted and curriculum that Burbank teachers developed will continue to resonate not only in the school district itself -- but throughout the state.

“The project did teach us a lot of lessons in how things work differently in school districts,” said Valerie Shatynski, a representative of the California Waste Management Board, which gave the grants. “There were a great deal of really creative lessons that came out of both the high school and the middle school.”

The Waste Management Board, which is charged with helping jurisdictions across the state with minimizing waste, is creating a website focusing on achievements in the Burbank School District during the past two years, making curriculum that Burbank teachers came up with available to schools across the state.

The $90,000 grant was used primarily to train teachers in the two schools, said Claudene Bell, grant coordinator for Burbank Unified School District. Teachers would attend summer training on how to teach environmental issues in any classroom, be it science, literature, art or math.

Jennifer Moses, a science teacher at John Muir Middle School, was surprised at how much enthusiasm her students had for environmental issues. Her eighth-grade homeroom started a program collecting batteries in the school, giving presentations in each class, and finally collected approximately 3,000 batteries.

“They were in charge of coming up with a program for the entire school,” Moses said. “They came up with a system for collecting the batteries. They even came up with a little pamphlet.”

Other teachers had students research the environmental stances of different politicians or make posters with facts about recycling on them. Julie Knoop, a biology teacher at John Burroughs High School, had her students collect water samples from a local watershed area and test their samples for pollution.

Knoop, said Bell, has already applied for a grant to help her continue focusing on environmental education.

The efforts of Burbank teachers is also reflected in the strengthened ties between the schools and the city’s recycling program.

The city of Burbank has offered the school recycling since the early 90s, said Burbank Recycling Coordinator Kreigh Hampel, but interest in the service has spiked since the schools began participating in the project.

“We’re learning how teachers could really bring this to a high pitch, how they could work in their classrooms to get those lessons out in almost any subject,” Hampel said.

Students have become more enthusiastic about recycling since they have been studying the environment in class, Hampel said, and he is taking the opportunity to increase the number of recycling bins at schools, and to provide the schools with up-to-date information on how much waste each school creates.

“We’re moving forward with a new vigor,” Hampel said.