By- Bridget Halls, GSD Communication Intern Fall 2024

Last year, Skyline High Senior Isabel Khachatryan met with GSD board member Julie Jackson during an Earth Club meeting at Skyline to discuss ways that students can make their school more sustainable. After also connecting with other Skyline students, Isabel and her peers were able to pilot a food waste initiative at Howard R. Driggs Elementary, where now they teach kids about what food waste is, who it affects, and why it is important not to waste food. Formally known as the ‘Good Neighbor Initiative’, and informally dubbed the “WasteBusters”, students are able to educate kids who were possibly unfamiliar with the problem of food waste, helping them develop a more lasting sense of sustainable actions and habits for the future.

There are many ways that a person can engage in sustainable habits or activities, but a child might not be able to do as much or might be told that they can’t have as much of an impact; since food waste is something that these kids can have more of a tangible impact on, Isabel wanted to make sure that they could empower and educate them about ways that they can help the environment, as the WasteBusters. 

Thus far in the year, the WasteBusters have created skits and presentations following their curriculum that covers ideas about the main principles of food waste: what it is, why it is bad, and who it affects. As the younger students engage in the activities, they answer simple questions about environmentally related ideas and connect the concepts with real life examples they observe. The older students have more in depth discussions about the methodology and impacts of food waste, and the personal connections that it has with them, as well as the WasteBusters themselves. For the most part the kids at Driggs Elementary are incredibly respectful and welcoming to the ideas and time that the WasteBusters give. Through bi-monthly presentations to the students, the group’s confidence and poise, their ability to grasp the attention of the kindergarteners, and the connections and relationships they have developed with the students was on clear display as each kindergartner sat with excitement upon seeing their faces, eagerly waiting in anticipation for the high schoolers.

Just as they have presented general ideas about what food waste is and how it happens, including the topics of gas decomposition in landfills, the waste of resources and labor as food is wasted, and how food waste affects others who do not have access to the food because it is in the garbage, Isabel hopes that in the future they are able to tell about more specific impacts and solutions to food waste, such as composting, and sharing or donating food – especially non-perishables. They have planned to take part in the Mount Olympus Community Garden and learn to compost and take a more hands-on approach to the concepts they have learned. They’ll later on also take over a box to grow food for refugee families, get composting bins, and grow green onions all to show the positive effects of recycling and repurposing. 

They were expected to create a timeline and curriculum, by the adults that support the Good Neighbor Initiative, for the elementary school students, that would be initiated throughout the year in order to show that they were responsible enough to engage with and continue the program. After talking with these students, I was able to see that they are well prepared to carry out this initiative throughout the year, and hopefully will succeed throughout this year and more to come; they’ve connected and gathered a group of sophomores and freshmen to create a more stable base of students who can sustain the program as the seniors graduate, in hopes that this project will live on beyond the 2024-2025 school year, and that it will expand to more schools than just Driggs.