Students across the district have been recycling for some time now and recently, grants have been sent in and funding has been received for dumpsters to be placed at each school.

Those new dumptsers won’t be used for “dumping”, however, but are instead being converted into large recycling bins.

Early Childhood Center Special Education Teacher Renee Parrigin has been working with students and other teachers across the district in order to get the funding needed to “go green” across the four schools in Clinton County.

“We wrote a grant to receive dumpsters at each of the four schools,” Parrigin said. “All the dumpsters have been delivered. We are in the stage now to change over by getting the trash cans and the Energy Teams will be painting the recycling symbol on the sides of them.”

The grants were written by different teachers throughout the district. At the ECC, Sandy Duvall and Parrigin wrote the grant; the Albany Elementary School Crystal Smith was the writer; Erin Casada at the middle school and Kathy Hunter at the high school.

A part of the grant stipulates, each school has to have an ‘Energy Team’ in place. Parrigin said each of the schools have a separate team in charge of recycling and making sure recyclable material is put in the proper containers.

“We are a green and healthy school. We have started cutting cost with electricity and things like that. We encourage teachers to turn off classroom lights when nobody is in there, turning off computers during school breaks, turning off refrigerators … just conserving energy,” Parrigin said. “There are different grants for green and healthy schools as long as you have energy teams in place. We think recycling is the next step. By recycling cardboard and white paper, we are hoping to cut down on our loads of trash.”

Parrigin said recycling those products will result in a smaller trash bill and save the environment. “We are trying to teach our kids to do the right thing by recycling,” Parrigin said.

Although the program is still new for the school district, Parrigin expects recycling at each school will have a positive effect on the students.

She said they have already been recycling Capri Sun containers and sending them to a company who in return pays the school two cents for each unit.

“We sell them at snack and we encourage the kids to bring them in,” Parrigin said. “We actually send those to a company and we get two cents per pouch and we have actually had $115.00 returned to us for sending those in. My niece went on vacation with us on fall break and we got a Capri Sun and we had to keep it all the way from Georgia to Albany just so we could turn it in.”

The goal for the school district is to teach recycling to young students in order to get them in the habit of recycling.

“With the big push for energy and going green, it’s just good for the earth,” Parrigin said. “We realize the cost of trash is going to be cut and in the higher grades they will understand more of the economic value of recycling. At home and as they get older, there are different areas of recycling that hopefully they will pick up on.”

As the hard economic times continue throughout the United States, everybody is looking at ways to save money. Cutting the cost of a trash bill could be one way to put a little extra money in your pocket.

“We are hoping that will alleviate some financial burden across the district,” Parrigin said. “We need to save what little bit we can save.”

With the grant, Parrigin said the school district will be able to tell over the course of time if recycling is saving money or not. The school district already has a baseline for how many loads of trash it hauls off each year and now they can compare it to previous years in order to get an estimated savings figure.

“If we have two truck loads that are going to recycling then that’s two truck loads that aren’t going to the landfill,” Parrigin said.

Other than doing their part for the environment, Parrigin said the school district can earn awards and will stand out among the state in education.

“With being green and healthy schools, our district can win awards. We received a Stewardship Award back in November and I am working on the paperwork for the Championship Award and the Leadership Award,” Parrigin said. “The Leadership Award will be the highest award we can get in this energy project. It will mean that we have everything established, we have communication in place that says we are getting the word out there about saving energy.”

With the attention focused on saving money and energy, Parrigin said now they have a way to look at the effects of recycling and conserving energy.

“Before we started the energy push in Clinton County, things weren’t formally done and there was not data or records kept,” Parrigan said. “Now we meet as a district and have printouts on how many computers were left on over a certain break … Teachers have check list of things they do before they leave for break. I think it helps if they have to turn that in before they leave.”

Parrigin hopes that by teaching students about recycling at a young age, they will take that lesson and apply it throughout the rest of their lives.

“Even with turning off the lights as I mentioned earlier, we’ve had times when no computer was left on and that is fabulous … It becomes a habit. Our generation hasn’t learned it yet,” Parrigin said. “Hopefully the generation behind us will pick it up.”