116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Family fun with a message
Iowa City students offer Earth Day event, while boosting environment
Apr. 21, 2023 6:43 pm
IOWA CITY — Iowa City High School students are leading the district in a composting initiative, reducing the school’s waste by almost 50 percent, according to Iowa City schools grounds manager Ben Grimm.
That environmental focus extended into the community Friday.
The students — along with students from Iowa City West and Liberty high schools — hosted an Earth Day event at Chauncey Swan Park in downtown Iowa City.
They invited their neighbors to come out and pick up wildflower seeds, make bird feeds, paint biodegradable planters and plant vegetables to take home. And their faces painted, if they wanted.
“It’s really unifying,” said Matisse Arnone, 18, a City High senior. “It’s rare to have something where all the high schools can collaborate across the district.”
This is the second year for the student-organized event. Last year, the students reached out to Tree-Plenish, a nonprofit that provides trees for communitywide planting.
“Students have really embraced it,“ Grimm said. ”The push for sustainability has been pretty strong for the last five or six years I’ve been here and continues to grow with student-led recycling programs.
“You’re seeing that interest everywhere, to the point we couldn’t keep up with getting the recycling bins to the schools fast enough.“
Iowa City schools are now doing single-stream recycling, a system in which all recyclables — including newspaper, cardboard, plastic, aluminum and more — are accepted. This is a “huge shift” from schools previously being able to recycle only paper and cardboard, Grimm said.
Composting, gardening
Arnone said the students advocated for a composting program — which they began during the 2021-22 school year after seeing how much food was being thrown away in the lunch room.
Arnone and other students spent time educating their peers on how to use the composting bins and the benefits of composting. Every day, students take the bins from the lunchroom and dump them into a larger bin outside to be taken away by Johnson County Refuse.
The students also have a community garden behind the school. They take shifts watering the produce over the weekends and during the summer. Anyone is invited to pick produce or try their hand at planting something, Arnone said.
Decorating
Iowa City West seniors Zoe Scott and Krisha Kapoor, both 18, were tending to a planter decorating station Friday with paint and biodegradable planters.
This year, the two have been teaching environmental science to elementary kids at an outdoor garden at Weber Elementary School in Iowa City. In the warmer months, they teach lessons at the garden two times a week.
Other community groups joined the fun Friday, including the University of Iowa’s environmental coalition, gardening club and environmental science club, the Iowa City Recycling Center and the Iowa City Office of Sustainability.
‘Seed bombs’
Mary Cate Pugh, 18, a City High senior, helped community members make “seed bombs” Friday — small clusters packed with wildflower seeds that can be dropped in the soil to bring greenery and colorful pollinator habitats to urban landscapes.
Pugh and her family are working to reduce their carbon footprint — the greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that are generated — by planting their own garden. This year, they are planting lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, eggplant, rosemary and thyme.
“Food really does taste better when it’s from your own garden,” Pugh said, adding she looks forward to making eggplant Parmesan and stir fry with the vegetables she’s growing.
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