June 7, 2010 issue
Treasure from trash
Lancaster school students begin composting program
By Fern Clemmer Lancaster Mennonite SchoolPage:
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LANCASTER, Pa. — Christine Baer got a good idea from trash. Or, rather, what wasn’t going into it.
Lancaster Mennonite High School junior Curtis Ranck, left, and senior Christine Baer add food scraps and biodegradable napkins to a compost bin at the school. The student-led composting project started this spring. — Photo by Fern Clemmer/LMS
Baer, a senior at Lancaster Mennonite High School, attended a band festival at Eastern Mennonite High School in Harrisonburg, Va., a year ago and saw students collecting food waste in their cafeteria as part of their composting program.
“I was incredibly impressed with the program and thought, ‘Hmm, we could do this at LMH,’ ” she said. “Last April, I took a petition of 150 names of students and teachers to the administration.”
Miles Yoder, then the high school principal, was enthusiastic and encouraging, she said.
Now she is one of 15 students who have a composting program off and running at their school, decreasing its trash and adding nutrients to its topsoil.
Each day one of five teams of three students collects food waste from the school kitchen, the dining room, and the Family & Consumer Science foods classes. Then they put the waste into composting bins on the south edge of campus.
Kenton Baer of Bainbridge, a 2007 alumnus, made the composting bins.
The students began collecting food waste in the school dining hall in early April, a week before they explained the program through a PowerPoint presentation in a chapel service.
“During this week students would approach me and ask what composting was and why we were doing it,” Baer said. “I enjoyed answering their questions because I knew they were learning something valuable.”
Baer hears conversations about composting while students are scraping off their plates in the school dining hall.
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