Mauldin Middle Show Leadership in Recycling

Mauldin Middle recycling honored
School named Recycling School of Year by DHEC

By Nathaniel Cary • TRIBUNE-TIMES WRITER • March 18, 2009

Earlier this school year, a dedicated group of students interested in recycling started a drive to recycle phone books at Mauldin Middle School.
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It was part of the school’s second-year recycling program that started small but quickly built into an everyday routine for teachers and students.

Students competed by classroom to bring in the most phone books, and the school collected more than 4,500. The drive went so well that students began recycling batteries.

Then they collected old shoes, more than 150 pairs, which can be chopped up and reused as rubber mulch on playgrounds and tracks.

Their efforts did not go unnoticed.

The school was rewarded by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, which named Mauldin Middle the state’s Recycling School of the Year.

Mauldin Middle’s recycling program started in force after Santee Cooper and Laurens Electric Co-op donated a solar panel that sits in the school’s courtyard. The panel provides electricity to power about two classrooms and has become a teaching tool and reminder to students that alternative energy solutions are available.

Gwendolynn Shealy, a seventh-grade science teacher who heads the recycling program, said the solar panel, named “Cooper,” redoubled the school’s recycling efforts.

“Having that at the school pushes them to understand that we have other sources of energy available. They’re going to have to solve these problems in the future that we have with our energy dependence on oil,” she said.

Now the school has a recycling group, the Go Green Group, that meets monthly to promote and plan recycling drives.

“It’s a group of people who want to change the Earth and want to help the environment,” said eighth-grader Kristina Nelson.

Each classroom at Mauldin Middle has a green recycling container for paper, and the Go Green Group collects the paper weekly. The school celebrated America Recycles Day and is planning activities for Earth Week in April.

“And if you’re a teacher, the kids will get on to you, too, if you throw something in the trash can,” Shealy said.

Seventh-graders Aaron French and Jake Delverde said students have caught on, especially when they’re offered prizes.

“You interest them with a prize, and so they get interested and it’s just an easy way to get them to start recycling,” French said.

The school added the state award to a 2008 Greenville County Solid Waste recycling school award, which Principal Rosia Gardner said reinforces to students that recycling is worth the effort.

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