By Brooke Hartman, Schools Outreach Specialist

DGS is proud to share this DCPS Recycles! Honor Roll Success Story from Deal Middle School!!

This year teacher Elyse Lerum was tasked with science instructional development at Deal Middle School. She used the organics pilot program as an inspiration for a group science project. These students conducted waste audits of their school cafeteria waste, finding that 60-80% of the waste on any given day was compostable or recyclable. By providing this data to DGS, these students gave valuable input to the planning for expanding organics pick up services to all DCPS schools in the 2014-2015 school year.

Lerum then worked with the Spanish Humanities students to implement the organics collection in the cafeteria by integrating into their class project on global warming, and were nationally recognized for their program in the We Can Change the World Challenge. These students were involved in various activities, such as handing out reusable coffee cups to the public and creating an educational video about global warming, which can be seen here. The students also advocated for their program and provided outreach to students at the start of the program in the cafeteria.  Special congratulations and thank you to team Pasamos la Voz for their outstanding involvement in the development of Deal’s organics collection program, as well as for input to the whole DCPS program!

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