Sequim schools going green?

From composting to simply turning the lights out, students and staff are putting a tighter grip on school resources

By MICHAEL DASHIELL
Staff writer

Suzanne Gray has her students in a circle in the Sequim Middle School cafeteria way past lunchtime.

She’s talking trash. And worms. And responsibility. And she has their undivided attention.

“This culture change,” Gray says, “starts with you.”

This particular project — composting at the middle school grades — is one of a number of plans districtwide not only to conserve and recycle resources but also to take lessons from such conservation.

In this case, Gray and students are learning how to reduce the amount of waste coming from Sequim Middle School’s lunchroom. The school serves between 415-430 lunches each school day, more than 150 days each academic year. And though the school does have a paper recycling program on campus, much of it is limited to two bins in the cafeteria.

“There hasn’t been any education about them and I am not confident that they are being used properly yet,” Gray admits.

For almost everything else, particularly the edible stuff, it was off to the garbage can — until now.

Enter the Clallam County’s Citizen Waste Reduction Group, a party of concerned citizens that formed two years ago on the peninsula. The goal? Simply to reduce waste in the county, most recently by way of the composting bin, helping peninsula residents do their share of reducing methane and global warming.

In Port Angeles, Franklin and Dry Creek elementary schools and Peninsula College already had such bins, but in early October, the Sequim area got its first bins at the middle school. The effort is the end result of a grant and a conversation between Gray and waste reduction group members a year-and-a-half ago.

In late October, group member Jack Caldicott joined Gray and the students in the circle, showing students the ins and out of composting.

Coffee grounds and apples? OK, Caldicott says. Citrus, meat, fish, dairy and fatty stuff? Not so much.

The bins need to be warm, Caldicott says, because worms, like human beings, like it warm, about 70-72 degrees.

Then there are the worms themselves. Red wigglers, Caldicott says. Breathe through the skin. Need oxygen, like us. They eat the bacteria that are eating the food, not the food itself, but it all works anyway.

Caldicott says his group figures they can get peninsula residents to start composting 80 percent of compostable products, rather than the 30 percent he estimates is currently composted.

“They think about the food cycle,” Caldicott says.

Not just that, Sequim’s middle school students are in charge of their own composting. Gray’s sixth-graders are responsible for maintaining one bin, seventh-graders the other and eighth-graders are quality control. The students, Gray notes, are in charge of letting others know what is compostable and what isn’t.

With responsibility comes perks — getting to skip to the front of lunch line is one — but most of this is about science. They have to check the bin temperature; measure out compost foods and add measured layers of “bedding,” such as newspapers and cardboard, to aid the composting process.

The students hope to harvest their first batch of worm castings (compost material) in December.

Gray says few students knew much about composting.

“A couple of kids are composting at home,” she says. “They are finding out where the garbage goes. Some of them thought it was buried in town. They want to help out.”

Now, Gray says, a group at the school wants to start a drive to reduce plastic bottle waste. In addition, Gray and Dave Katter, a Sequim High School biology teacher, are getting training to introduce the 2,000-pound challenge this academic year. The challenge is intended to engage students and teachers in practical strategies to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 2,000 pounds or more over the course of the school year. (See www.coolschoolchallenge.org).

The culture of conservation, Gray reminds her students, starts with them.

Conservation: A districtwide focus

John McAndie, Sequim School District’s maintenance and operations supervisor for the past four years, knows a little bit about garbage. He’s well aware of the costs the school district incurs in trash removal (about $39,500).

That, and the costs to supply buses with gasoline and heat buildings, were well on the minds of an eight-member group of staff members who convened Sequim School Districts’ Energy Task Force in August. McAndie joined teachers, administrators, a representative from Clallam County PUD and superintendent Bill Bentley in problem-solving what looks to be the district’s second-largest area of cost, fuel, right behind payroll.

In basic bus transportation and maintenance costs alone, the district figures to spend nearly $1 million in the 2008-2009 academic year.

In recent years, the district has made some strides. In the past two years, the district has cut down on exterior lighting after school hours and, in 2006, cut school bus runs in half by joining elementary and secondary routes.

McAndie points out the change in the Sequim High School gymnasium’s lighting.

“Our gym was awfully dark,” McAndie says.

With a grant from the county PUD, the district exchanged the gym’s 400-watt halite bulbs for 130-watt fluorescents, saving 270 watts per fixture while improving light quality.

“We’ve got double the light for nearly 70 percent of the energy use, saving the district $7-10 per day,” McAndie says proudly. He hopes to see the same in the middle school and community school gymnasiums in coming months.

The school board also recently approved the purchase/lease of a trash compactor, one that will likely trim the district garbage removal costs, McAndie says.

Conservation within the district, however, has its limitations, McAndie admits. Case in point: Sequim Community School. The district heats the school with an antiquated steam boiler that costs $90,000 per year alone. In all, the school costs between $110,000-$120,000 to heat each year, while other, newer schools cost about $65,000 each year to heat, McAndie says.

Part of the cost is the mechanics of the system: To heat one room, the boiler system winds up heating the whole school.

So why not replace the boiler with something more efficient? That would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, McAndie says. The school did get a remodel when it was converted from an elementary school into a middle school in 1979, but McAndie says there were no upgrades in heating or insulation.

Ironically, McAndie notes, it’s easier to upgrade 1920s-era buildings such as the old high school (currently the rooms attached to the high school auditorium) than the 1940s-era community school.

Instead, McAndie and others are looking are current practices and what staff, teachers and students can do now to help save the earth — and in the process, the district pocketbook.

“The trick is educating the kids,” McAndie says.

Some don’t need any extra goading. Kai Antrim, a 2008 Sequim High graduate, pushed for a recycling program on campus that allowed all recyclables to go into one bin.

“We’re finding our collection of recycling products has dramatically increased (after that),” McAndie says, adding, “We may see recycling bins go into the elementary schools this year as well.” Recycling at the high school is so strong, McAndie is pushing to replace bins with small dumpsters.

But conservation isn’t always the obvious, like plastic cartons and lunch-turned-compost. McAndie says there’s plenty of energy to be saved by doing simple things such as making sure district machinery is operating efficiently by replacing heating filters or coils in refrigerators. The school district has a computer-driven heating system for most schools equipped with carbon dioxide sensors. When people leave a room, the system senses it and reduces the amount of heat and outside air pumped into that room. The same system can be programmed to shut down the heat at the end of, for example, a weekend community event in the high school gym.

McAndie admits there’s still plenty of room for growth for the district to conserve, mostly in the area of lighting and community school heating. That’s why he and other energy task force members plan to meet for the rest of the academic year, learning what they can from what’s working within the district and from a Princeton Energy Resources International study called, “School Operations and Maintenance: Best Practices for Controlling Energy Costs.”

The conservation cause already may be sinking in, particularly at Sequim Middle School. The school’s sixth-graders worked with members of the Olympic Park Institute to weigh all the food they brought out to the institute’s Lake Crescent base and now connect that idea with composting from their own lunchroom.

“That stems into a science project,” McAndie says. “(It’s) kind of a win-win.”