photo by: Mike Yoder

Second-graders at Prairie Park Elementary School line up to dump several classrooms worth of recycling into a new recycling bin Tuesday at the school. For an Earth Day project, a group of second-graders made a petition and collected over 300 signatures from other students to add a recycling dumpster to their school grounds. The students will be in charge of emptying classroom recycling into the large bins daily.

The student petition delivered to the desks of Lawrence school district officials had hundreds of signatures. Some of them fill the entire line with unsteady lettering; others consist of only a first name printed in capital letters. Despite their varying penmanship, the effect is the same: The names fill line after line under a proposal to expand the recycling program at Prairie Park Elementary School.

The petition, drafted by second-graders at Prairie Park, requests larger recycling bins for the school, which was limited by the capacity of household-sized carts. The idea came about following a lesson about Earth Day, and the students visited classrooms in kindergarten through fifth grades to gather the signatures, collecting 327 in all.

Their efforts have since paid off. A recycling dumpster was recently delivered to replace the two household-sized recycling carts that previously served the entire school. On Tuesday, students excitedly collected paper to recycle, some still in disbelief.

“It surprised me that we got what we wanted because we’re only in second grade,” said 8-year-old Keira Norris, who helped gather signatures for the petition. “Now I don’t have to worry about anything not being recycled.”

photo by: Mike Yoder

Second-graders at Prairie Park Elementary School line up to dump several classrooms worth of recycling into a new recycling bin Tuesday at the school. For an Earth Day project, a group of second-graders made a petition and collected over 300 signatures from other students to add a recycling dumpster to their school grounds. The students will be in charge of emptying classroom recycling into the large bins daily.

photo by: Mike Yoder

Second-grade students at Prairie Park Elementary School pose with a petition they created to expand the recycling program at their school.

About 350 students attend Prairie Park, and the petition explains that the school’s recycling bins would fill quickly, causing some materials to be thrown away instead. District officials said they were impressed by the students’ effort, and they coordinated with the city to modify the school’s recycling program.

“They did a really good job of stating their case and giving good reasoning behind it,” said Tony Barron, director of facilities and operations for the district. In addition to arranging for the delivery of a recycling dumpster from the city, the district provided rolling collection bins for the school’s common areas.

Prairie Park is one of two elementary schools this school year to improve its recycling as a result of a student-led effort. In December, a group of fifth-graders at Cordley Elementary expanded their school’s program as well.

However, many schools in the district still have limited recycling. Barron said that only the six secondary schools and a few elementary schools in the district have recycling dumpsters. The remainder of the district’s 21 schools still use the household-sized recycling carts. Those carts fill up quickly, said Lori Greenfield, who teaches second grade at Prairie Park.

“Most of the time it would fill up in a day, and then it took two weeks before they would come and dump it,” Greenfield said. “So if we collected it in our rooms there was nowhere to take it.”

The district hopes to improve recycling options for schools. Barron said the goal is to have recycling dumpsters at all schools by the fall of next year, but a hurdle to realizing that goal is the additional labor it requires of school staff.

“That’s the toughest part, is we’re understaffed from a custodial standpoint,” Barron said. “So trying to work with the schools to get (recyclable materials) from the classroom to the dumpster is the biggest challenge right now.”

Barron said recycling programs are not district led, so it’s up to schools to coordinate logistics of their programs. For Prairie Park, that means students are creating posters to educate others about the new program, and will also be the ones to empty the classroom bins.

The students are now in the process of enlisting volunteers from the approximately 20 classrooms at Prairie Park. The student volunteers will help offset the extra work required of custodial staff by depositing recyclable materials into the new bins, which custodians will deposit in the dumpster.

Through the multistep process, the students are also learning another lesson, Greenfield said.

“If there’s something they want to do, they can create change in whatever facet it might be,” Greenfield said. “Whether it’s school or community or home, if you go through the problem-solving steps, you can create change.”