As many of you know, Bodkin works hard to be a Green School. We have our environmental fair, we have an environmental committee, we recycle, we work to reduce our use and waste, we have our terrapin program and our butterfly gardens, etc. All of these efforts not only include our teachers and students but it also includes our parents and community. So with all of these efforts, it is only natural that students would question about whether it would be possible to replace Bodkin’s Styrofoam (aka polystyrene) cafeteria trays with compostable trays.
A group of parents, teachers, administrators, and county cafeteria managers met to discuss alternatives. The parents were tasked with looking into commercial compostable lunch tray services. While looking into this, they came across an upcoming county council meeting (June 18) that would be considering a county bill to ban polystyrene in our county. Current and future Bodkin students, Niko Papa, Barrett and Griffin Aiken, and Alex and Owen McCreery, all went to the Anne Arundel County Council Meeting and did an excellent job speaking to the delegates in support of the polystyrene ban. That night the bill was passed (4-3) and the ban will go into effect on January 1, 2020.
http://www.capitalgazette.com/news/government/ac-cn-county-council-0619-story.html
Kristin McCreery who was at the meeting said this was an amazing civics lesson for the students. The Bodkin student spoke first and as 25 more people spoke in favor of the bill passing, the speakers would often acknowledge these Bodkin students as our future and our need to protect our environment for that future. Mrs. McCreery believes it was a swing vote, and if not for the effort of these students and the subsequent speakers, the vote would have gone differently.
We want to thank these Changemakers for inspiring us! Wow! If this doesn’t teach us that no task is too great and no effort is too small, I don’t know what would.