Sonya Elder's Response

Sonya Elder responded really quickly and I was really happy with the information she gave me. First, she let me know that she would be available to meet very often at BHS around lunch time. She gave me a quick overview of what sustainable dining practices were being implemented in the cafeteria. A big part of this was a transition from styrofoam plates to more ecofriendly plates. And this was very recent as of the week I received this email. I had seen styrofoam plates in the cafeteria not two days prior to this. But shortly after they disappeared. Instead, they offer customers a reusable plates in the hot line and at the salad bar.  Disposable plates are still available, but they've been switched from styrofoam to a biodegradable material.  She said that they would soon be switching to a paper soup bowl instead of a styrofoam one. She also emphasized locally purchased foods and beverages. The school purchases produce every week directly from Lanni Orchards, which she described as a family farm in Lunenburg, MA.  This time of year they get apples, carrots, squash. In addition the school buys some apple cider from "Joe Czajkowski's Farm" in Hadley, MA. The B.Good Burgers that are served at the cafeteria every Tuesday are made from all-natural locally-sourced beef. The beef comes from Pineland Farms Natural Meats, a collaborative of 250 family farms in New England. Also, B.Good's tomatoes are grown on their very own rooftop garden. Fair-trade organic coffee is now served in the hot beverage section of the cafeteria. Apparently, the hotline usually features a meatless option every Monday -- "Meatless Mondays."  In addition, the salad bar has expanded to offer a greater variety of "fresh vegetables and offerings, such as tofu and garbanzo bean salad."  Fresh fruit cups and yogurt parfaits (so good!) are always available in the "grab-and-go" section of the cafeteria. And vegetarian options are always available at the deli where they assemble your choice of sandwich. There is always vegetarian sushi as well. Vegetarian/Vegan options take much less energy to produce than animal products (this includes dairy products) because animals take much more energy to grow than plants.

Cafeteria & Library Statistics

Last week, while in the cafeteria, I observed the dining practices of students in the school cafeteria. I really wanted to know how they felt about recycling and what their real everyday interaction with the Green Initiative looked like. Were they regular recyclers, did they take out reusable plates, did they return them. I focused specifically on waste management in the cafeteria: what students (and teachers) did with their trash. On Tuesday 2nd Lunch, Thursday 1st Lunch, and Friday 2nd Lunch I counted how many plastic bottles were put into the recycling and how many were put in the trash. The recycling bin and the trash were only 15 feet apart.

Tuesday: 31/56 milk bottles were recycled
Thursday: 18/33 milk bottles were recycled
Friday: 26/47 milk bottles were recycled

Consistently, only a little less than half of the milk bottles I counted were thrown into a trash can only 15 feet away from the recycling. Although this a huge improvement from 100% of milk bottles being thrown out, we're still not quite there and BHS is not as green as they like to make themselves seem. I always thought that the insane amounts of "raising awareness" at Brookline High School about global warming and such was unwarranted, but clearly a lot of people are still not totally conscious of the way the choices they and their peers make affects the total carbon output of the school.

Next I went to the Library, curious about how people saved and recycled paper. I observed that there were without a doubt more recycling bins than trashcans and this helped improve paper recycling. In a similar experiment to the one I did in the cafeteria, I saw that flat paper was ALWAYS recycled. I didn't see a single person put flat paper into a trash can. The paper that was thrown into a trash can, which I observed only three times, had already been crumpled up into a ball which I found very interesting.

Email to Sonya Elder

Just a quick update: <thomaslv93@gmail.com> sonya_elder@brookline.k12.ma.us Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:23 AM Sustainable Cafeteria Practices gmail.com

Hi Ms. Elder,
I'm doing my Public Speaking research paper on sustainable cafeteria practices at BHS. I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about it. Particularly if you could tell me about the styrofoam vs washable plate situation.
Thanks,
Thomas L-V

Narrowing my Topic

So I've decided to narrow my topic down to the dining and waste management practices in the cafeteria. I'm going to do research into the new practices that have been implemented including the real plates vs. the styrofoam plates that the "healthy food" is served on, the disappearance of the plastic baskets they used to use, and the recycling practices in the cafeteria. I'll try to get into contact with Sonya Elder and do some investigation of my own. I'd be particularly interested in seeing how many people actually recycle and what motivations are hidden behind these choices. I would also be interested in seeing how effective the recycling process actually is and what they can do to improve it.
Also, how do our dining practices compare to other schools in the area? Or around the world even? I'm sure there are schools in Sweden that cook by using solar power or something of that nature. We will most definitely not go that extreme, but what are other schools doing to go green? Also what is the cost of all this? In dollars? How much money needs to be spent or raised to make these changes to the system? Because new materials need to be purchased, some people may have to work more so wages may have to increase. Where does this fit into the school budget? And how do other schools deal with that? This could really develop into an interesting project. And what about the actual structure of the cafeteria itself? Is there something about how the food lines move that can take up more or less energy? Is it well insulated enough so that too much heating does not have to be used to keep such a wide space warm. There are a lot of great questions to answer here.

The Next Step

Now that I have effectively compiled a list of accomplishments that SAJE and the Green Committee have claimed, its time to see if these changes have actually been implemented. Clearly, the biggest topic here is the cafeteria. What exactly has the Green Committee done to make the cafeteria more environmentally conscious? For this, several people have suggested I talk to Sonya Elder, director of food services for the school department. Apparently, being in charge of the Brookline cafeterias, she was highly involved in the changes made by the Green Committee and several recent changes as well. What I've seen for myself recently has been a decline in the policies originally proposed and implemented by SAJE and the Green Committee. Particularly the reusable dishware. The ceramic plates and plastic baskets are practically gone since so many students were in the habit of leaving them outside or throwing them in the trash. However I've noticed that the recycling policy for recycling bottles is still around in the cafeteria. And people use it a lot. I also want to talk about what could almost be called a cultural phenomenon where students and teachers alike a trying desperately hard to reduce their paper use. Many teachers, especially in the language department I've noticed, are making tremendous efforts to translate almost their entire course, aside from the occasional worksheet and of course the tests, online. My Spanish teacher, Sr. Mendez, has been using a cool website called Voice Thread to have verbal conversations online about specific topics. My Philosophy teacher, Mr. Dickerman, has even raised enough money to buy his own set of class computers to use with google docs and gmail so that people can read articles and take notes online at home and read them during class. And obviously, you (Mr. Fischer) are a big fan of using the internet as well.

Responses to my Emails

I had previously requested information from several people highly involved in the green initiative at Brookline High School by email. When I checked my email the next day, I was happy to see that I had received several responses. Mr. Grande responded offering to meet with me later in the week. He informed me that Ms. Mary Minott, a social worker at Brookline High School, would be more qualified to comment on the successes of SAJE's Green Committee. Although I had known that Ms. Minott was involved in the green initiative (you had recommended I talk to her after my first blog post) I had no idea that she was actually in charge of the Green Committee. This was news to me. Mr Grande then went on to list what he considered the Green Committee's major accomplishments. These were:

• Sustainable dining practices (including reusable plates, recyclable plates, locally grown food, and less meat)

• Recycling (Toter Tuesday)

• Paper and plastic bottle reduction (Through the effective encouragement of teachers and students to reduce the amount of paper they used for school work)

• Climate Action Day (In addition to its normal methods of raising awareness, which include word of mouth, email and facebook and other online social networks, and posters and images around the school.)

This is already a great deal of information. After sending Mr. Grande a thank you email, I went on to read Rachel Sandalow-Ash and Sophie Lazaar's responses. In addition to a similar list, they explained to me the reason for the split from the SAJE group. The two are still highly intertwined, but the idea was that much more could get done if the problem was attacked from many different angles at the same time. Their committee was more about research ways to have a sustainable education environment while SAJE was more about spreading the word and implementing changes that their committee would research, explain, and try to facilitate.

I went on to contact Mary Minott and let her know about my project. She has not yet responded, but if she does not, I expect the students involved will be just as willing to talk to me about it themselves.

Getting Started

I sent out several emails to set up meetings or get preliminary information from people involved in the green initiative at Brookline High School. My first instinct was of course to shoot Mr. Grande an email, him being the leader of the SAJE organization. As I looked deeper and talked to a couple of my friends, I was notified that another group had branched off from SAJE's Climate Action Committee. The Environmental Action Committee, founded and run by Rachel Sandalow-Ash and Sophie Lazaar has been equally involved in the fight against global warming, particularly recently. I was also interested in talking to the Environmental Sciences teacher at Brookline High School, Ms. Brown, to whom I had been directed by several of my friends, students in her class. She should be a good source for a background of the issues, but most likely less about the actual action being taken to lower carbon emissions at Brookline High School.

In my email to Mr. Grande, I explained the project I was doing and asked him if he was interested in giving me an overview of the issues and what Students for Action and Justice in Education (SAJE) and their Climate Action Committee had actually done regarding these issues (preferably besides simply raising awareness about the problems). To Rachel Sandalow-Ash and Sophie Lazaar, I posed similar questions in addition to questions  regarding the reasons for their separation from the SAJE group and an explanation of how the two groups worked together. For Ms. Brown I, aside from the typical questions, I asked whether or not this was a big aspect of her class and how well she thought students at Brookline High School understood the challenges and what they could do to help. I wanted her to evaluate the attitude of Brookline High students towards this green initiative. I also asked her for a list of people I could try to talk to in order to go further in depth. We'll see where this takes me from here.