1st graders stomp for good reason -- They're recycling

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (The Record) -- The first-graders at St. Bernard School might not know a great deal yet about the growing hole in the ozone layer or the world's rising temperatures and shrinking rain forests. But they sure know how to stomp the dickens out of the aluminum cans they and their school-mates are recycling.

Last week a passel of first-graders from Jeanne Maser and Carolyn Louderback's classes took a few minutes from their studies to smash several dozen cans before placing them into recycling bins. And each week the children are learning a little more about the environmental benefits of saving landfill space and conserving natural resources as they take part in St. Bernard's HOPE Recycling Program. HOPE stands for "Help Our Planet Earth," and even that name is a product of the students' efforts - a contest to name the program, which began last September. The recycling effort is part of the school's "Step-by-Step Student Stewardship Program," designed to get each class to focus on a particular area of social concern. The first grade subject area is recycling; the second grade's is the problem of hunger. Other classes learn about and contribute to helping such areas as health care, the elderly, veterans and education. "I learned about Step-by-Step at St. Patrick's (where the program was founded in 2002)," said Lori Hadorn-Disselkamp, who is coordinator of Step-by-Step at St. Bernard. The recycling program for the first grade, though, is her brainchild. Hadorn-Disselkamp is a St. Bernard graduate who said she grew up in the parish. And now she's a volunteer mom at the school. She and her husband Aaron have four children - six-year-old Ethan, a first-grader; Anna, 4, Spencer, 2 and Jake, who is just a year old. "I love this parish, and I love this school, and this recycling program will be permanent here at St. Bernard as long as I'm here," she said cheerfully. "And with four children we're going to be around here for a long time." The school has had recycling programs in the past, she noted, but "they've kind of come and gone." "Since the first grade's Step-by-Step area was the environment, I talked with the teachers and we thought that this would be a good chance to show the kids how significant recycling could be," she explained. She began by searching through the phone book for recycling companies and happened upon a firm called SP Recycling. "They recycle lots of materials for local businesses and companies, and on the day I called, the woman who deals with their clients, Karen Watts (an SP procurement manager), just happened to be in the office," Hadorn-Disselkamp explained. "She said, 'It's lucky you caught me, because I'm rarely here,' " she said. "And I said, 'It wasn't luck, it was divine intervention.' " The result has been a remarkably successful school-wide effort that has even reached into the surrounding community to help. During the week, students collect aluminum cans, newspapers, magazines, office papers and junk mail and place them in 30 green recycling bins donated by Metro Louisville's Operation Bright Side. In the school parking lot, SP Recycling has parked a huge semi tractor-trailer, minus the tractor. Inside are 20 large boxes, five-feet tall and four feet wide. It's into those boxes that the recycled materials are placed, and once the trailer is full, SP Recycling brings an empty one and hauls the full one away. The school reaps some financial benefit from the recycling efforts, too. Hadorn-Disselkamp said their first check from the recycling company netted $184.43 -- which the St. Bernard community donated to a parish on the Gulf Coast heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Eventually Hadorn-Disselkamp hopes to use funds from the program to help provide tuition assistance "to those kids who really get involved," she said. From that first truckload of recycled materials, the 400 students of St. Bernard School were able to save 69 trees, 28,298 gallons of water, 1,884 gallons of oil, 2,389 pounds of air pollution, 16,593 kilowatt-hours of energy and 12.5 cubic yards of landfill space. That's according to information provided to them by the recycling company. Midweek, Hadorn-Disselkamp recruits a few first-graders to make the rounds of each classroom where the recycling bins are placed. She pulls a wagon she bought for the project, the kind you might use if you had a large garden. "The kids love it, of course, because it gets them out of class for a while," she said with a chuckle. "But they're also learning about the importance of saving resources, and if they learn something this important this early in life, my hope is it will stay with them and that over the years our little ol' recycling program at St. Bernard will do a lot of good." It's working like gangbusters so far, she noted. It takes only three or four weeks to fill the trailer, and "each week we're getting a little more and filling the boxes a little faster," she said. "The surrounding neighborhood is taking part, too," she added. "There have been people coming to the trailer and saying, 'We're not bothering anybody right now, are we? You're not having Mass or something?' So I know they're not from the parish. We sent flyers all around, so people know the trailer's here." Hadorn-Disselkamp thinks the program might prove useful for other schools in the Archdiocese of Louisville, and she'll be glad to share the details. She can be reached through the school's main office at (502) 239-5178. - - - This story was made available to Catholic Online by permission of The Record (www.archlou.org/therecord), official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville, Ky.

Secret Archives of the Saints, Subscribe Today

---

This story was made available to Catholic Online by permission of The Record(www.archlou.org/therecord), official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville, Ky.