Going Green in the High School

Fair Grove High School students have taken action to the school’s need for a better recycling program. In previous years, anyone living in Fair Grove could drop off their recycling at City Hall. Some students at Fair Grove even offered their time out of their schedules to go and pick up recycling that teachers had. Since then, those students have graduated and the recycling at the city hall has been discontinued due to improper use.

Sarah Brannock, a teacher at Fair Grove, was the first to hear about these problems, and decided to come up with a plan to do something about it. She decided to get her Animal Biology classes involved as a project they could do to better the environment as a whole. Brannock says “I was really impressed! I thought students wouldn’t want to be involved and not want to apply themselves, but they have gone all out. They want to put a club together, get t shirts, and have expanded the original plans to be much bigger than we can even do right now.” She goes onto say that numerous students have already began to start recycling outside of school at home. A school club, Green Team, has also been established with Ms. Brannock as the head organizer promoting people to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Andy Garcia, the head custodian at the school, has helped lead the recycling project to give any assistance needed to the students who will take charge of the recycling. He says, “Ms. Brannock’s classes have really helped run the program. They have put together teams of people to gather the paper, as well as the plastic and cans. All of these materials will be collected from the elementary, middle, and high school. This has been a dream I have tried to put in place in previous years, but not enough people were ever interested in taking on the responsibility. Now maybe with more students involved it can really happen!”

Derrick Lampe (12), a student in one of Brannock’s Animal Biology classes, talks about how the classes have really come together as a whole to make this plan work. Derrick’s family, who owns Ozark Mountain Sanitation, plans on helping the school by taking the recyclable paper, plastic, and cans into Springfield to the recycling plant. Lampe says “After watching the videos Brannock showed us about the problem with world wide pollution, it really isn’t too hard to recycle. There isn’t a reason why people can’t do more, they just simply choose not to.” The Lampe family will be able to come and pick up the recyclable materials once every week.

Ms. Brannock sums up saying that she is very encouraged by the Green Team’s efforts so far.