Recycling the focus of OC class project

Posted: Monday, May 24, 2010 9:07 pm
By: Emily Williams, Messenger Intern

By EMILY WILLIAMS
Messenger Intern
This past week has been “clean out your locker week” at Obion County Central High School.
For the students in the school’s Com-prehensive Developmental Center class, this meant they would be busy with their class project — recycling.
For the past two years, CDC students have made recycling the school’s waste one of their top priorities and each student has a job.
Every classroom in the school has a small recycle bin and the students begin by collecting their contents in larger bins, which they take back to their classroom. The students then sort through the bins, separating them into paper and plastic and discarding the occasional trash that is mistakenly placed in them. In the sorting process, the students also find a lot that can be reused, such as envelopes, clean paper, binders and notebooks.
“This group really practices the three R’s — reduce, reuse and recycle,” Obion County Solid Waste director Mike Cary said.
The school is also benefiting from the recycling project. It cuts down on the cost for garbage collection and shreddingpapers is helpful for teachers who need to get rid of private information.
“It’s just an all-around great partnership,” Cary said. 
More importantly, the project helps the students involved.
School CDC director Nathan Castleman explained that many of these students need physical therapy with their hands, and flattening out paper wads is great for this. Further, the students improve their fine motor skills by removing staples from collected papers, and separating the items into their appropriately labeled boxes helps with their reading and vocational skills.
“This project teaches a lot of good work habits, and the experience is good when the students leave the CDC program because they can get related jobs,” he said.
Editor’s Note: Emily Williams, daughter of Roger and Juli Williams of Woodland Mills, is a senior at Rhodes College in Memphis. She is interning at The Messenger this summer.
Published in The Messenger 5.24.10