Waste and Custodian Awareness

Public project summary

Many teenagers are particularly prone to littering, partially due to their ignorance about their impact. As such, our plan is to fill the gap in their knowledge by hosting a cleanup event during a social-emotional learning class after lunch at a school in the Bay Area, thus demonstrating to the students the importance of custodial work and illustrating the negative impact of leaving waste around. In essence, the custodians will not clean up trash left out for one lunch. The students, who have the SELF period after that lunch, will clean up the campus instead, supervised by the custodians. The goal is for the students to see the impact of them not cleaning up in a more comprehensible fashion, as well as understand that impact in the context of those who do have to clean up after them. There will also be a brief video presentation by a custodian, introducing them to the students to increase the connection between the student body and custodial staff. The students will fill out surveys before and after the activity asking about their perception of custodial duties and their littering habits.