Our mission in 7th grade is to make the world a better place (Tikkun Olam). After our Sukkah project, we are going to focus more on our local community: the school. Previously, we had a thriving composting program at school; composting hundreds of pounds of food waste per year. Since we went virtual last spring, our composting program has stopped. We are hoping to start back up again; with the help of the 7th graders.
Before starting the composting program again, the students all had to know the WHY behind composting (you know as well as I do they won’t do much work if they don’t understand the purpose). We focused on the WHY by understanding how much trash we actually produce and how much goes into a landfill (in a normal year, we would have field tripped to a landfill…but this is the next best thing). If we understand how much food is thrown away and wasted, maybe we can see the need for a compost program to do our part in helping our environment.
This is a glance at the partnerships in work trying to figure out just how much trash we produce (and eventually, what we can do to fix that problem).
Visiting 7th grade during this discussion, it was clear how engaged the students were in this topic. As students began to understand the scope of the challenge and what they could do to reduce MJDS’ environmental footprint, students began to move from engagement to empowerment.