Several Cranston schools participated in National Green Week in early February, making them part of an effort involving almost 250,000 students in 44 states.

Although Green Week began officially on Monday, Feb. 2, Bain Middle School has chosen "Go Green" as its theme for the entire school year. A Green Committee, consisting of students, teachers, maintenance staff, parents, facilities managers, school board members, local businesses and anyone else that is invested in the community going green, was formed at the school. The school's initiative prompted the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living to select Bain to be a Pilot Green School, one of only three in the state.

According to its Web site, www.apeiron.org, "Apeiron is at the center of a statewide effort to have sustainability principles be at the heart of ALL growth and development in the state, making Rhode Island a national leader and model 'sustainable' state. [Their goal is to] transform Rhode Island into a sustainable state where the needs of the present are met without compromising the needs of future generations. We lead by example and serve as an information portal that educates, connects and inspires individuals, families, schools, businesses, communities, governments and other institutions to live more sustainably."

Schools Energy Officer Karen Verengia has been very involved with Bain's Go Green committee, sitting in on meetings and connecting the school with Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corp. Several groups of students from Bain took a tour of the landfill during Green Week and Max Man - RIRRC's recycling mascot - came to speak to the students and staff at Bain on Feb. 4.

Max Man told the students present in the auditorium at Bain that they were the true superheroes in the room because they had the power to save the world by doing their part to recycle.

"Every person in this room - students, teachers or visiting super-dude - will use 700 pounds of paper each, this year," Max Man said to the crowd of students. "That's seven trees per person this year. You are middle schoolers. You're old enough to know about cause and effect. A school this size can easily use one ton of paper a week. [If you recycle,] in the course of a school year you can save 600 trees."

Oaklawn and Gladstone Street Elementary Schools marked Green Week in their own way, getting students excited about sustainable living.

According to Principal Linda Stanelun, at Oaklawn Elementary School each grade level chose an activity to do during Green Week and the school as a whole did a pre-weigh of their snack trash and a post-weigh of their snack trash, after students increased their recycling efforts during Green Week.

"We weighed in 25 pounds of snack trash that we were throwing away at recess before we stepped up our recycling efforts," Stanelun said. "On Friday we weighed in with only 13 pounds of snack trash. That's about a 50 percent reduction."

Stanelun noted that she, herself, was particularly inspired to do something for Green Week, after taking the school administrators trip to the Central Landfill earlier this year. She noted she was very much affected by what she saw there and was determined to make an effort at Oaklawn School to change things.

"I wanted us to come up with little ways to change how we do things here, in order to make a big difference," she said.

At Gladstone, the week started with a green activity at the weekly Parent CafÈ on Monday morning.

Each Monday, the Parent CafÈ is open for parents to meet, socialize, discuss educational issues and have a chance to talk with school staff or hear guest speakers from the community. For National Green Week, B4L AmeriCorps Members taught parents how to make a reusable lunch sack for their children. The activity was a big hit and will be repeated later in February.

Both Gladstone and Oaklawn have "Morning Broadcast" programs and both schools used them to promote Green Week. At Oaklawn, for each day of Green Week there were quotes, tips and suggestions, as well as questions and answers about recycling and taking care of the environment. Every grade participated in providing content and then broadcasting it.

At Gladston, the fifth-graders took the lead, announcing daily green tips. The school hallways were also lined with green facts such as "Every minute, 37,000 empty soft drink bottles are thrown away in the United States," "Every ton of recycled paper saves 380 gallons of oil," and "One recycled aluminum can saves enough energy to power a television for three hours."

In Elizabeth Scorpio's classroom at Oaklawn, students created an "Oaklawn School Goes Green" quilt based on what they read together in several stories.

"We've been talking about going green for the past month," third-grader Tyler Lopez said. "We've been doing it a lot. It's been really fun. We read a couple of books, like 'The Three R's,' 'Why Should I Recycle,' and 'Ten Things I Can Do to Help My World.'"

Fellow third-grade student Kyle Badolato said the class put together a chart delineating "what we know, what we want to know and what we've learned." From that, the students chose three ideas, then their favorite out of those three, and made it into a quilt square.

Each of the boys had a different favorite idea for the quilt. Badolato's idea was "I will help the environment by feeding the birds in the winter," while Lopez's idea was "I will turn off the TV when I am not using it to help the environment" and "I will use both sides of my paper."

In Heather Tanzi's and Kristin Vitale's second-grade classes, the students made their Valentine's Day boxes out of all recycled materials.

The fourth-graders at Oaklawn School wrote poetry about saving and protecting the trees in the rainforests.

Gladstone's Kidventure program's Green Team and Green Thumb after-school class learned about the importance of recycling and created Eco Super Heroes. Gladstone's Principal Mark Garceau was pleased with the activities of the week.

"The AmeriCorps kids did a nice job. We are going to be meeting with them after the break about starting a Gladstone Gardens project which will allow them to continue some of this environmental education," he said.

"We took baby steps this year," Stanelun agreed. "We started small and next year we'll do a little bit more to make a bigger difference."

Bain also participated in a weigh-in, weighing their paper recycling in the classrooms each morning as part of a school-wide competition to see the impact that the school's recycling has on the environment. A "Recycling Tree" was placed in the front hall of the school so that students can observe how many trees are being saved with Bain's recycling efforts. Paper recycling bins now cost the district money, so Bain students were involved in a project to create their own bins for the classrooms, as another part of the Green Week activities.

"This [tree] is a nice thing for a building to have in their foyer, to show all of their hard work," Verengia said. "People have really gone above and beyond the call of duty to get things done."

Thanks to recent district-wide upgrades to lighting, equipment restoration and refrigeration systems, Bain, along with six other CPS buildings, is trying to qualify as an EnergyStar Building.

In March, all of the elementary schools in Cranston will have the opportunity to send a handful of students from each school to the National Energy Education Development Conference being held at Park View Middle School. There will be a date for grades four, five and six as well as a date for kindergarten, first and second grades. According to Verengia, there is a certified NEED educator, teacher Joanne Spaziano, at Park View Middle School. She is on the board of advisors for NEED and helps them with their curriculum packages. She offers classes to the whole state of Rhode Island and students from all over the state come to Cranston to participate in NEED workshops.

"I've been working with other administrators to have a NEED Conference just for Cranston schools," Verengia said. "[Executive Director of Education Programs and Services] Judy Lundsten got grant funding for buses, NEED is paying for the substitute teachers as well as the snacks and drinks."

The National Energy Education Development (NEED) Project is a nonprofit energy education association that has focused on teaching students and teachers about energy for over 28 years. NEED programs and activities are: science-based, interdisciplinary, inquiry-based, hands-on, designed for grades K-12, reviewed by a National Teach Advisory Board and correlated to National Science Education Content Standards, according to the NEED Web site, www.need.org.

For more information on National Green Week, visit www.nationalgreenweek.com