This year the special education, or SPED, program has taken over the recycling program on the Hill.
Teacher Cindy Gay was intimately interested in having her students work with the recycling program after noticing the lack of recycling in her community.
“You see so many buckets of paper thrown in the trash and I was like ‘hello let’s just recycle it, I don’t understand’,” Gay said. “It just seemed obvious to me, saving the planets right?”
Teaching the students where their trash goes and the impact they have on the environment around them is the overall goal the teachers have for their students. Gay has done several projects in the past where the students use their recycled trash and turn it into art, a lesson to teach them that beauty can be found everywhere.
“We have done projects where [the students] make something out of [recycled] cardboard,” Gay said. “We painted mandalas on cardboard to use trash and make something beautiful. It’s something to learn and it’s good to learn.”
Megan Mitchell, who is the pre-transition academy student teacher, believes that recycling benefits not only the environment but the students as well.
“It’s just a good skill to have,” Mitchell said. “You know we do it as a motor skill, being able to push the things [trash bins], picking things [trash] up, and opening the bins.”
The importance of recycling has been taught to the students for all the five years Mitchell has worked here at Clover Hill. She believes that taking over the recycling department is the perfect activity for the students to work on continuously.
“We talk a lot about recycling and the environment,” Mitchell said. “It’s really just a job skill that we try to focus on to make them stronger.”
As of this year, 2023, Chesterfield County no longer actively participates in recycling. Science teacher Michelle Huber is grateful that the SPED department took over the recycling here on the Hill and hopes the importance of recycling is remembered through their hard work.
“I think it’s great they are getting on the job training,” Huber said. “We are turning back the clock by 25 years [by not recycling]. We need to be better stewards of the Earth and not take giant landfills if we don’t need to.”
Although residential recycling no longer exists in Chesterfield County, there are many private curbside recycling companies that are still willing to help their communities. FOr parties interested in curbside recycling, call Choice Waste Services at 804-234-4444 or Tidewater Fibre Corporation, TFC, at 757-543-5766 for assistance.
