Green Team
The Green Team helps #RalyaRecycle!
In 2023, staff at Ralya learned that the school had a problem. The recycling items were getting mixed together so there wasn't enough room for cardboard boxes in the bins. These boxes were ending up in the dumpster instead. Fifth grade teacher Sarah Haagensen posed this problem to her students and they wanted to take a look for themselves. They found that paper wasn't ending up in the Paper Gator dumpster, some items were ending up in the recycling that shouldn't be, and still other things that could be recycled were ending up in the trash. Students came back to the classroom and talked for an hour about solutions. The first: create The Green Team. It started small: just the 28 students in Mrs. Haagensen's classroom. Students felt they needed posters, videos and donations from community members to help their ideas come to life. Students were divided into four groups within the class to tackle these tasks.
One group designed posters for the main entrance at Ralya and worked to determine common items that should be included on a classroom recycling poster.
Another group wrote letters to various community businesses asking them to support the initiative to help Ralya Recycle. The goal was to receive support to purchase Green Team t-shirts and collapsible wagons to help with the weekly collection. The school received several donations, including wagons from Walmart's Spark Good program, resources and monetary donations from MiSTEM Network, PaperGator Recycling, the Foundation for Haslett Public Schools, Granger Waste Services, T-Shirt Goods, and four members from the community.
Two groups wrote their own scripts and worked on recording and editing videos. One to be a Call to Action, encouraging our Ralya students and community to recycle and help our planet. The other is a How to Recycle video to show students how to properly recycle here at school. Both of these videos will also encourage the community to use our Paper Gator dumpster properly. This will benefit Ralya directly through the funds received from recycled paper. Both videos can be found on the Haslett YouTube page, or here:
Call to Action video
How to Recycle video
Mrs. Haagensen's students hope this initiative will spread to the other Haslett school buildings and beyond! But for now it spread to 50 students in the 5th grade during the spring of 2024. In the fall of 2024, it became a lunchtime club for any 5th grader who wanted to make a difference. Mrs. Haagensen has hopes that this will become a tradition at Ralya and that these 5th graders will continue this initiative through the rest of school and in life.