Nicholas Ward, a local filmmaker and artist, helps a group of Cordley Elementary School students sort their lunch scraps into bins for compost materials, non-compost materials and recyclables. Ward has spent the last year developing a food waste mitigation and composting program at a handful of Lawrence schools as part of a partnership with the Sunrise Project funded by a Kansas Green Schools grant.

Some kids keep gerbils as classroom pets. Others, rabbits or guinea pigs or goldfish. Bev Hyde and her second-graders have earthworms.

The box of slithering, slimy, faceless critters in the teacher’s Cordley Elementary School classroom — put there to teach students about vermicomposting, or the harnessing of worm poop to create a nutrient-rich soil conditioner — isn’t a conventional choice, but Kaiea Blum and Isabel Luellen are rolling with it just the same.

The girls, taking a break from classroom activities Wednesday afternoon to spritz a fresh layer of water over their worms’ newspaper bedding, have actually become somewhat attached to the little guys over the last several weeks. Their shredded newspaper should be damp, Isabel explains, but not soaking wet — or else the worms could drown.

“Worms can’t drown,” her classmate Kaiea says. That’s true, Isabel responds, though she knows better than to leave her worms “totally underwater for like, five hours.” That would be bad, the two agree.

These kids think earthworms — and the small yet vital role they play in our ecosystems — are pretty cool, and they’re not alone in their enthusiasm. At least not at Cordley, where three classrooms are taking part this semester in a new curriculum, developed by local filmmaker and artist Nicholas Ward, designed to get students thinking about the food we eat — and the food we often needlessly throw away.

Ward, known to Cordley students as the “worm guy,” has spent the last year working with nonprofit The Sunrise Project to implement his food-waste mitigation and composting programs in four schools across the Lawrence district. The project, funded by a Kansas Green Schools grant, has led to partnerships with New York Elementary and Free State High School last fall, and, this spring, Cordley and Liberty Memorial Central Middle School.

It’s important, Ward and his partners at Sunrise Project say, for everyone to be mindful about food waste. Approximately 40 percent of our food goes to waste each year in the U.S., according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and more than 97 percent of food waste generated ends up in the landfill, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

And the earlier, they say, the better, to create awareness and knowledge.

“Even at our Food Policy Council level, they’re just now starting to think about the food waste part of it. And I think that’s sort of common in the local-food movement in general,” says Melissa Freiburger, director of programs for Sunrise Project. “People think about farm-to-table, but they don’t think about ‘after the table.'”

Students, Ward says, seem to be receptive so far. They’ve learned how vermicomposting works — worms eat our food scraps, which then pass through their bodies to become castings, or worm waste, that can be used as an earthy, rich soil amendment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not difficult to hold a small child’s attention when the topic is poop.

But kids, given some time to get used to things, have also been quick to jump on board with Ward’s food-waste audits. On Wednesday, only his second day implementing the system at Cordley, students and staff lined up at the end of lunch to dump their scraps into three bins: one for recyclable materials, one for compost — bits of uneaten lettuce and carrots, mostly — and one for trash.

On a mild day last fall, Ward and students at Free State collected all the food waste from lunch the day before, spread it out on a tarp and began sorting through the seeming trash piece by piece.

“What I didn’t expect, though, was that there were 30-some unopened milks, 80 unopened string cheeses and 77 pieces of silverware,” Ward says. “So, we ran the numbers on it, and that was a lot of money (wasted) annually in silverware. But that was because they just dumped things.”

It’s easy to mindlessly toss things into the trash, even reusable cutlery, Ward says, especially when you’re not used to doing otherwise. And whether we’re aware of it or not, every little bit adds up.

Case in point: Every Thursday, Ward picks up the compost scraps — food that otherwise would have gone to waste — amassed that day at New York. That’s around 320 pounds in food waste collected since October, and only one weekday’s worth, Ward points out. A handful of local farmers do the picking-up on the other four days of the school week. Soon, they’ll be invited to do the same at Cordley, he says.

“It’s an underutilized resource right now,” Ward says — one that could be used by farmers and at the Sunrise Project site or in school gardens, when the weather warms up a bit.

At Cordley, the kids even have a separate, smaller bin set up in the school kitchen where students and staff can leave scraps for the worms. They’re taking ownership of it, Ward says. Eventually, he’d like to see the program become its own initiative through the school district or county. In the meantime, he’ll plan on reapplying for the Kansas Green Schools grant to fund next year’s efforts.

The folks at Sunrise are excited, too, by the possibilities. The next step might be to branch out at other schools, Freiburger says, and maybe grocery stores and even homes, where folks could leave their compost outside for Sunrise kids to pick up.

“So, there’s a lot of potential,” she says. “But this is kind of the beginning stage.”