News & Events >> Earth Day Every Day

Earth Day Every Day

Date: 04/22/2009
Time: 9:45 AM

The entire school celebrated Earth Day with a parade to the Peace Garden on April 22nd.  Poetry was recited and "Trash Man" was presented. "Trash Man"has been a working project of Jared's Advisor Group this spring. The students collected the packaging created from one week of middle school lunches and they have created sculptures from this trash.

The students were informed about the actions the school community is taking to help the environment. 

The motto of the WMS Earth Team is "Earth Day every day".

WMS Accomplishments 

Staff using ceramic mugs vs. paper cups saves 12,350 paper cups in a calendar school year (Sept-June).  

By not printing the school directory, WMS saved 10,600 sheets of paper, just over 21 reams of paper.  That is nearly 1 1/3 trees and 400 lbs of carbon.

The Middle School saves over 3500+ pieces of paper each year by sending the weekly staff email, the unit work plans and the parent memos electronically. That is over 97 lbs of carbon and 1/3 of a tree.

The Sixth Year pizza business saved 4450 individual, disposable drink cartons by converting to recyclable gallon jugs.  4450 drink cartons would cover 68% of the area of the WMS lower soccer field. 

The students in Nancy's, Martha's and Robert's classrooms use cloth for dishes and tables saving approximately 170 rolls of paper towels each year.

Stacey's class uses erasable sentence strips saving an entire sheet of paper with each use.  They save 2508 sheets of paper a year. She also sends an electronic email each week to 27 parents which saves 1026 sheets of paper each year.  These two actions save over 7 reams of paper, 129 lbs of carbon and nearly half a tree. 

The use of cloth napkins for lunch in Stacey’s room saves 32 pounds of napkins in a school year, which is equivalent to 1.6 reams of paper and 30 pounds of carbon.

Teresa's class uses scraps for paper mache, reuses colored pencils and writes on both sides of paper for reports.

Lower School classrooms use of cloth napkins for lunch saves 11,210 napkins in a school year.

The use of a drying rack rather than using the electric dryer saves 34 kilowatt hours a month – approx. 306 kilowatt hours per school year; approx. $57 per school year.

All classrooms have compost buckets and recycling buckets and the students are responsible for compost management for the school garden.