Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 20, 1994 TAG: 9404200089
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By MELISSA DEVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Maggie Beal is saving the world one milk jug at a time. The 10-year-old Harding Avenue Elementary fifth-grader was sitting at home one day, reading a magazine article on Earth Day, a day set aside each year to raise public awareness on the environment.
"It said Earth Day is April 22 and I thought, 'Gosh, I should do something to celebrate,'" she said.
So Maggie, with no help from adults and no prodding from her teacher, took on a recycling project for the entire school. After working a deal with the teachers to offer 30 minutes of extra recess time as a prize, she challenged her schoolmates to bring in as many milk jugs as possible. After several weeks of working through her lunch hour and before school, she has collected almost 400 jugs.
"I've never seen so many milk jugs!" she exclaimed.
With milk jugs hanging from the walls, milk jugs filling a storage closet and still three more days left of the contest, Maggie was faced with her own challenge: what to do with all that plastic.
Undaunted, she picked up the telephone, called the county recycling center, and asked for help.
"A lady named Tina said she would try to help," Maggie said. "She called me back 10 minutes later and said a recycling truck would come by and pick them up."
Maggie is an exceptional example of a child who, all by herself, made a difference in the environment.
"If you just believe in yourself and stay organized, you can get things done," advised Maggie, "even if you are still a kid."
Children like Maggie will be particularly aware of the world in which they live Friday as most schools in the New River Valley will celebrate Earth Day. Ecology clubs will clean up trash, and children will work on art projects using recyclable material. The topic for the day will be how to make the world a better place in which to live.
Eileen Alwang, a first-grader at Gilbert Linkous, recently wrote about how she would change the world if she could. There would be more trees to climb; she would ride on the backs of whales; and most importantly, everyone would be happy.
"I like the ocean because the colors are pretty and I'd make sure to pick up all the trash," she said.
Eileen and her family do their part for the environment. "We recycle boxes, cans, milk cartons and papers," she said. "And we [compost] rice and noodles and stuff."
Teachers are seeing the value of environmental education, and have begun to incorporate it into many of their classes.
Linda Olin, who teaches art at Blacksburg Middle School, has worked with her students on a yearlong "Art and the Environment" project, in which they have set out to build a beautiful amphitheater on an unsightly area of the school's front lawn. The students have drawn diagrams of the site, built birdhouses, made clay tiles and created other materials that will be used when construction begins.
"We're working with everybody to come together to reclaim this land," Olin said. "And hopefully, by the end of the year, our art students will be environmentalists."
Describing her class's mission as New Art students, Olin wrote "the Earth is [an artist's] canvas and their philosophy is 'it's dirty - let's clean it up.'"
The environment is the perfect medium for interdisciplinary teaching, too. In English and science classes, the sixth-graders at the middle school are learning about ways to avoid toxic wastes and other pollutants being dumped in the ocean.
In Riner Elementary School, the pupils are making their community a better place to live by composting leftover cafeteria food into compost and mulch. The Virginia Tech Cooperative Extension Services is helping out on that project.
At Auburn Middle School students, 22 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders have gained statewide recognition for their work in saving the environment. The school ecology club won the 1993 Governor's Award for Environmental Excellence last year and its members met former Gov. Douglas Wilder. It was the first time a school from the New River Valley had received the award.
The group started its own recycling center at the school and has worked with the county to keep the project going. The response has been overwhelming, said club sponsor Kitty Brennan.
"A good thing about this group is that we don't look back, but we look at what we can do now," Brennan said. "I've been taking glass to the recycling center in my 1969 Falcon for a year now, and we just do what we have to to make recycling work."
In other areas, schools are doing their best to promote environmental awareness. At Belview Elementary School, pupils will celebrate Earth Day by making new paper out of old, a prime example of recycling. And at Riverlawn School in Radford, the ecology club is building a Children's Forest to celebrate Earth Day. The club received a $100 grant from Hills Department Store to plant flowering trees, fruit trees, evergreens and hardwood.
by CNB