Ask Allison Ullman what a kid can do to save the Earth, and she’ll probably point to signs that went up this week in front of Blue Valley schools.
More than 90 signs, three at each school campus, designate the pickup lanes in front of schools as “Idle-Free Zones.”
The signs resulted from an Earth-friendly Girl Scout project that continued long after troop members earned their Bronze Awards.
“Once we started, we couldn’t stop,” said Allison, 11, whose troop began the effort last year by asking Overland Trail Elementary School parents to turn off their cars while waiting to pick up students.
Allison and her fellow Scouts are part of a growing number of students who are taking it upon themselves to make their schools greener.
“The urgency of climate change weighs heavily on that generation,” said Margaret Thomas, chairwoman of the Prairie Village Environmental Committee.
Students bring a gung-ho, do-something-now urgency to efforts to save the Earth, said Matt Riggs of the Mid-America Regional Council.
“As soon as kids hear about a good idea, they want to implement it,” said Riggs, the outreach coordinator for MARC’s solid waste management district.
Often, he said, they’ll keep bugging adults on an issue until something happens.
That’s what some sixth-graders at Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in Lenexa hope will happen with their efforts to return to reusable lunch trays in their cafeteria.
In September, the school’s 20-year-old dishwasher broke down. The parts needed to fix it are no longer made, and custom-made parts would be a budget-buster, said Principal Kent Peach.
So the school began using disposable plastic foam trays until a new dishwasher could be installed over the summer. That bothered some students, who had learned in class that plastic foam fills up landfills and doesn’t biodegrade.
“We really think this needs to be changed,” said Dylan Crow, 12. “It’s a very big thing. It’s important to deal with it now.”
Some moms volunteered to hand-wash the trays with help from sixth-graders, but that wasn’t allowed because of health regulations and space limits. Peach said kitchen workers are already hand-washing and air-drying pots, pans and utensils, leaving no space to air dry the trays.
Students also tried boycotting school lunches and encouraging others to do the same, but they haven’t been able to sustain the boycott.
Now they’re researching biodegradable trays, which are more expensive but kinder to landfills.
Peach praised the students’ research and ideas. But, he said, the hard lesson they’re learning is that sometimes it’s simply not feasible to take action.
The Overland Trail Girl Scout troop’s search for a Bronze Award project turned up a simple idea: The air around their school would be cleaner if parents turned off their cars while waiting to pick up their children.
They prepared computer slide shows, made buttons, passed out fliers and installed their own signs at school.
A group of kids from Sunset Ridge Elementary had embarked on a similar project, and both groups approached facilities director Dave Hill this summer with the idea of establishing idle-free zones across the district.
The result was “Idle Free Zone Day” on Wednesday as part of Blue Valley’s first-ever Clean Air Week.
Joan Steurer, an air quality planner with MARC, said she expects to work with more young people on clean air issues.
“I think the kids are going to lead us,” she said. “Sometimes we don’t give kids enough credit. This is much more than a Girl Scout badge.”
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