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Shades of Green

Posted on | May 21, 2009 | 1,556 views |

 by Julia Harris

Many good ideas never mature past the “Oh! What a good idea!” phase.

But for the students and teachers at Cranbrook Elementary, a small school within walking distance of campus, a good idea hatched by employees in the business operations arm of Ohio State’s Office of Business and Finance has germinated into a fruitful partnership.

“We thought we’d like to reach out to a Columbus city school, so we just starting throwing out ideas of what we could do,” said Teri Goldammer, a human resources staff assistant with business operations.

“We decided to go with the Scarlet Gray & Green initiative and sustainability because that’s so big right now.”

So, with not much else in place but a desire to help and an interest in promoting sustainability, Goldammer and her colleagues - among them her boss, Helen DeSantis - began looking around for a school to partner with.

“We decided to adopt Cranbrook because it’s a wonderful location for us - only a mile away - and it’s a very diverse school, with kids that speak more than 30 languages,” DeSantis said.

“Plus I don’t think this school has had very many volunteers come in to help, so there’s a level of appreciation I don’t think you get in a lot of schools.”

After meeting with school principal Cynthia Ball and the building’s leadership team in December, Goldammer and her crew launched the “OSU/Cranbrook ‘GO GREEN’” project with a green-themed Valentine’s Day assembly a couple of months later.

At the gathering - highlighted by an enthusiastic O-H-I-O led by Bill Shkurti, senior vice president of Business and Finance - students and teachers were given “plantable” Valentines printed on paper embedded with wildflower seeds.

For their part, the Cranbrook students have rolled out the green carpet to welcome their OSU partners.

The school is decorated in themed artwork, like big green posters festooned with empty plastic water bottles and soda cans, banners made from handmade paper and festive green ribbons tied around the trunks of mature trees on the school grounds.

Their enthusiasm is contagious, Goldammer said, and has sprouted a number of other creative ideas to engage the school in learning about the conservation of resources and recycling.

In one project, classrooms planted soybeans - some in soil and some in sand - and compared growth patterns, while also learning how Ohio State uses biodiesel made from soybeans to power its CABS buses.

Volunteers from Business Operations made bi-weekly trips to the school on their lunch breaks to visit each classroom and check on the soybeans. Back at the office, they met regularly to discuss ideas and implementation plans - also on their own time - and even put together an educational video about recycling.

Two of the largest initiatives were engineered to coincide with the two major “green” days of 2009 - Earth Day (April 22) and Arbor Day (April 24).

For the first, Goldammer arranged for the local Kroger grocery store to donate a bundle of 500 paper bags that the kids then decorated with recycling-themed art. When all bags had been customized, they were given back to the store and used to bag customers’ purchases on Earth Day.

“Everybody here had to go out and shop at the Kroger just so we could get some bags for ourselves,” DeSantis said. “One of my personal favorites said ‘Go green. Don’t litter. If you litter you are lazy.’”

No one was allowed to be lazy on Arbor Day, when students and teachers worked together to plant three Dawn Redwood trees donated by Secrest Arboretum in Wooster. The trees are special not just because they were free, but because they have a special story of their own.

“Apparently everyone thought these trees were extinct until the 1940s when someone found them growing in China,” Goldammer said. “They grow to 120 feet or so, but it takes around 50 years for them to get to full height. I guess we’ll just have to come back and visit.”

While Cranbrook waters and watches its new trees, it’s also busy on another, more immediate task: Collecting plastic bottle caps as part of a national recycling initiative led by the hair-care corporation Aveda. The goal of the project, Goldammer said, is to collect as many caps as possible during the school year that Aveda will then recycle into containers for a new product line.

The kids at Cranbrook have turned the challenge into a competition: The classrooms that collect the most caps will earn a field trip to Ohio State on May 29, where they will be driven around campus on CABS buses and treated to an appearance by Brutus Buckeye.

All told, Goldammer says, the project has gone very well - especially for something that’s been done pretty much by the seat of everyone’s pants. While the flexibility and spontaneity of the partnership are two of its major strengths, she says she also looks forward to having time over the summer for more careful planning and for getting more people involved.

“Part of what’s exciting about this project is that we’re able to develop it as we go along,” DeSantis added.

She grinned.”It’s hard because we’re starting from scratch, but it’s exciting and challenging and rewarding because we’re starting from scratch.”

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