Terracycle

Back in 2010, I was still kind of a newbie in the school district I was working for and I was a paraprofessional.  It was safe to say that back then, as a paraprofessional, I had more time on my hands as the students I was working with were more manageable.  So I decided to take over some of the fundraising opportunities that the school was participating in.  Now, participating is a strong verb to use here in this case.  Basically, there was a box sitting in the school office and it collected a few Box Tops, a few Campbell's Soup labels, and maybe a couple of Kemps Milk Caps.  Kemps and Campbell's has since ended their programs.  Then I was in the grocery store one day and I was picking up some items for school.  I ended up seeing on a box of Capri Suns that there was a fundraising opportunity for schools, and I had to read the back of the box.  So being the fundraising guy, it caught my eye.  The program advertised on the back of that Capri Sun box was a program called Terracycle.

Terracycle is a great program.  Terracycle is a company located in New Jersey and it has grown and become international. It has more than one purpose to it and it was also a good lesson for the students in addition to being a fundraiser for the school.  Terracycle recycles, or upcycles, waste that isn't usually accepted in normal curbside recycling programs.  There are many initial assumptions as far as what Terracycle takes, and please don't go thinking it is like the movie "Back To The Future 2" where anything and everything goes into the DeLorean for fuel.  However, there are things that you didn't think Terracycle would accept, but does.  Another assumption that people had when I tried to explain the fundraising program was when they said, "So, I just have to bring you my garbage?"  That was gross when people wanted to participate and that's what they thought they had to do.  Even though the program involved waste, there was a process.

Of course, I jumped into this idea and program with both feet.  I had decided to enroll our school into the program and I basically introduced it to my coworkers at the time at a staff meeting.  I simply told them to remember the name Terracycle.  I said it was a program that we were going to do and that they would be hearing about it more often.  So I jumped in with both feet.  I probably should've stepped into this project one foot at a time, but I guess I was ambitious.

So Terracycle took things like candy wrappers, cheese packaging, and cereal bags and paid schools one or two cents a piece for the items.  Each collection that they upcycled was called a brigade and it was paired with a corporate sponsor so schools could send in the material for free by the shipping being covered.  For example, a candy wrapper brigade was sponsored by M&M/Mars.  The candy wrappers were from any brand of candy and that was the case with most brigades.  It usually wasn't brand specific.  There have been a couple of brigades along the way that were brand specific, but the idea here was to help schools and keep as much waste as possible out of the landfills.  When our school launched the program, the students had good intentions, but there were some really gross submissions.  So we had to make sure we were very detailed in explaining how to submit things for Terracycle.

Our school has recently passed the 10 year mark in being a part of Terracycle.  The most successful brigade that we had participated in was the candy wrapper brigade.  Come on, we are school, what do you expect?  Our school has approximately 60-70 students everyday in a school year, and we sent in over 11,000 candy wrappers totaling over $200.00.  Some people may say that it is only $200.00, but I look at it as we made $200.00 on candy wrappers that would've normally just made their way to the garbage can.  We have participated in 40 different brigades since we joined the Terracycle program in 2010.  As corporate sponsors decided to leave a brigade, sometimes that brought an end to the brigade, which is really hard to accept!  When you are used to turning in things to Terracycle and all of a sudden you have to throw those items away in the trash again, it's kind of sad.  Our school has raised almost $1,200 since we began 10 years ago, and we have upcycled over 67,000 items, which means over 67,000 items stayed out of the landfill.  Some of the other things we currently upcycle and send into Terracycle is air care products and packaging sponsored by Febreeze, most personal care and beauty items and packaging sponsored by Garnier, empty toothpaste tubes and floss containers sponsored by Colgate, empty deodorant containers and personal hygiene items sponsored by Tom's Of Maine, Burt's Bees items and packaging, and more.   Our school actually was surprised with an award once by the Terracycle program.  We had participated in a brigade sponsored by Scotch Tape.  This brigade accepted empty disposable tape dispensers, empty tape cores (the plastic middles of tape rolls, and all the packaging as well.  It was back in 2015, and our school was recognized by being one of the top 10 collection sites in the nation for submitting items to this particular brigade.  So, we were given a small cash bonus, and we were sent a box of Scotch Tape supplies for our school.  The funny story about this is I had no idea as the coordinator of the program for our site that this was coming.  One of my coworkers came up to me and said, "I saw the article in the paper... congratulations".  I just smiled and said thank you and I had no idea what he was talking about.  I had no idea that there was a press release that Terracyle did. Then, I found it.


I am really glad that our school has participated in this program for 10 years.  I am also glad that our school still found a way to currently participate in this program because so much has changed as far as our what our school needs have been over the years.  I will tell you that the most important thing that has made this a successful program at our school is the staff buy-in.  Our school has a couple of major key players that has made this program be a complete success.  Their passion has motivated our students to pay attention to this program and has inspired them to want to help by submitting items of their own instead of throwing them away in the garbage.  That is the coolest part of this, the students learning the valuable life lesson of doing their part in taking care of the environment.

Be Kind To Everyone.

Distance Learning: Six Weeks Later

Here in Minnesota, we are in our sixth week of distance learning.  I can't believe that Friday, March 13th was our last day of school in person with our students.  I never anticipated it to be this long.  As a Behavior Interventionist, I was worried that Friday the 13th was going to influence the student behaviors that day.  It turns out that it ended up being the least of my concerns.

As the school week of March 9th arrived, and as each day happened throughout the week, more and more changed.  The biggest change that made everything real and take it to the next level that week was the evening of Wednesday, March 11th.  I remember that the talk of Coronavirus was really heating up and on March 11th, that was the night that the NBA became the first professional sports league to suspend its season.  I remember laying in bed about 8:30 p.m. CST and I was looking at my phone.  I had seen on Twitter that the NBA was going to suspend their season after that night's games.  I immediately turned my television on and went to ESPN, who was showing NBA games that night.  The game that was currently in action was still going on.  The announcement came in the second quarter of that game.  I watched the rest of it, and the play by play announcers were calling it like it was going to be the final game ever.  This was the first time I really felt uncomfortable with the Coronavirus, or COVID-19.  So that game I was watching came to an end, and there was to be one more NBA game on ESPN before the season was suspended.  So I tuned in, and sure enough it was cancelled because one of the NBA referees had been an official at a game a few nights earlier where the first NBA player who tested positive for COVID-19 had played in.  This announcement changed everything, and everything fell like dominos after that, including moving the Coronavirus into the A topic on all the news channels.

I remember going to work the next morning, on Thursday, March 12th, and my principal, who was out on medical leave, was communicating often about the changes with school that seemed to be changing hourly at that point.  By the time Friday, March 13th, had arrived, our school staff was told to take home things that they may need long term.  At that point, long term was translated as a week or two.  I didn't think we would be here on May 4th saying that we are still in distance learning and we will be doing distance learning for the remainder of the school year, which goes until June 9th for our school.

Early on when all these changes were happening so fast, as an educator, I really didn't take time to stop and think about it too much.  I mean there was so much to be done in a short amount of time.  Our school only had student Chromebooks for the last couple of years.  The school I work in is a public school that is located in a residential treatment facility for adolescent males and that is why we just started integrating more technology within the last couple of years.  It was a blessing in disguise. We had no idea that we were silently preparing for distance learning.

As a Behavior Interventionist, the meat and potatoes of my job is to be an out of class support to students as well as to be on the front lines when a crisis or behavior issue is taking place in a classroom.  A lot of my job is to build student relationships, build trust, help create an environment of feeling safe, which all of my coworkers and I helped make happen.  We also focus on developing and practicing healthy life skills.  I also coordinate a school wide behavior level system, which all of our students participate in.  The obvious question that I asked myself was, "How I am supposed to do this all over a computer from a distance?"  It's a variation of the same question that all the teachers were asking about the curriculum they were going to change and provide.  For the support staff, the most underrated piece of the whole education picture, what was going to be their role from a distance?  Thankfully in Minnesota, the Governor gave Minnesota schools two weeks to plan for what distance learning is going to look like.  For our school, our spring break happened to be the first week of the two week planning period, so our school pulled everything together in just five days.

We modified our behavior level system and the goals that we score the students on.  We also still had them earning school dollars (not real money) for each point they scored on the level system to keep them bought in. Then, we began distance learning with our students on Monday, March 30th.  Throughout the whole planning process, I just continued to do instead of stopping and thinking about everything because I didn't want to get overwhelmed.  If I just focused on one task at a time, I only had to think about things in pieces instead of the whole situation that was going on and changing so often.

So, like I mentioned, we are in our sixth week of distance learning.  I think it is safe to say that it is way more difficult and way more stressful than I could have initially thought.  As a Behavior Interventionist, controlling the environment is important.  With distance learning, the only environment is what you can see on the screen.  While in person, I can be there on the scene, process with the student and encourage them to make a safe and positive choice to get more support in my Refocus Room.  Now, I have to rely on the fact that they will log into my Zoom Room at their designated time.  If the student isn't in a positive place, then it is easy for them to push the support away or not log in and get the support, and that has been mentally draining.  Our school really goes above and beyond when it comes to distance learning, because the more school they have, the more safe and structured their day is.  So, some of our students have six 20 minute Zoom sessions a day and some of our students have eight 20 minute sessions per day.  Our students also participate in a Restorative Practices Talking Circle once a week, and the have additional times where they can visit my room, the Refocus Room, during a 30 minute block every day.  Each teacher is paired with a paraprofessional and they also offer two 30 minute blocks of Zoom office time for assignment assistance with students daily.  It is a lot, but necessary with being in residential treatment.

I feel bad for the 2020 seniors of all schools who will probably have a virtual graduation.  They also missed out on prom and will be missing out on an all night grad party at the end of the year.  However, it is necessary.  Just a couple of weeks ago, the federal government was anticipating the Coronavirus killing 60,000 people in the United States throughout the course of the virus.  We are currently over 65,000 deaths nationwide, and things don't seem to be slowing down yet as testing is continuing to increase to a level that is still catching up to where it should be.  The talk of our summer school session, or ESY, being offered through distance learning seems to be almost certain.  Now there are a lot of talks about things in the fall being different, altered, changed, or postponed.  That is the other tough part of all this.  What started out to be a mindset of adjusting for a couple of weeks has now turned into months, and now there are some reports that social distancing may be necessary for up to two years.  When you combine that on top of the stress that distance learning has already provided, it feels scary.

I am blessed that I am working at a school that has great leadership in the building I work in.  I work with a team of staff who supports each other and focuses on problem solving when things get tough instead of turning on each other.  They also know how to laugh, and that is extremely important these days. I have recently participated in some webinars with other school officials and have heard the horror stories of the intense conflicts that have taken place at other schools between staff members just because of distance learning and that just doubles or triples the mental exhaustion.  Distance Learning is not the way I want to be working with students, but it is the way that it has to be right now.  I have to remember how important self care is when going through this process, and that would be my words of wisdom or advice to everyone right now.  Part of my self care is writing and doing this blog.  So, take care of each other and most importantly take care of you.  This will get better.  Maybe not as quickly as we want, but it will get better.

Be Kind To Everyone.