AURORA | His hands clad in thick, black work gloves, Isaiah Williams probed around the old computer tower with a red-handled screwdriver.
“I can’t understand why it’s not coming out,” the 19-year-old said as he tried to yank out a power supply. He hunched over the work bench at Overland High School to get a closer look, his safety glasses just a few inches from the persnickety power supply when he figured it out.
“Oh, I think I see it,” he said, poking the screwdriver at the other end. “That’s why, there was a screw.”
As Williams wrenched, pulled and pried his way through the old computer tower, five of his classmates in the Cherry Creek School District Transition Program did the same thing at their work stations. They snapped down plastic clips to get circuit boards free and meticulously removed tiny screws from hard drives. Then they plopped the useful pieces in an appropriate bin and tossed the waste on a trash heap.
The work is part of a new program aimed at getting special-needs students in the district’s Transition Program — which serves 18 to 21-year-old students who have graduated from high school but still receive services from the district — into the booming electronics recycling industry.
The electronics recycling program, which started in December, is a partnership between the district and Colorado Springs-based Blue Star Recycling, a nonprofit that employs several disabled workers. When the old electronics from CCSD are torn down — and there are thousands upon thousands of old and no-longer useful district computers waiting to be dismantled — Blue Star comes by and picks up the useful pieces. The students aren’t paid for their work.
The whole scene in the former jewelery-making classroom has a professional, assembly line feel to it. And that’s exactly what staff from the CCSD Transition Program want.
“We have really tried to make this completely authentic,” said Amy Cleveland, a Transition teacher at Overland.
Cleveland and other staffers visited Blue Star last summer for a three-day training and they’ve tried to emulate what they saw there back at Overland. Students come in each day and they have a daily quota of machines they need to disassemble, and Blue Star specifies what can and can’t be recycled.
But Cleveland said the authenticity stretches beyond the exacting requirements of the electronics recycling business.
“We are able to teach all of those other work skills that you don’t always think about but you really have to learn somewhere,” she said.
That includes showing up to do the same job everyday, coming in when there are far more appealing options like movies or sleeping in, she said. They also get to feel the sense of camaraderie that only comes from closely working with others toward the same goal.
Chris Loftis, employment specialist for the program, said the partnership makes sense. The district has hundreds of thousands of pounds of old electronics that can’t be tossed in a landfill just sitting at a district storage facility, he said. And with some training, the electronics recycling industry is one that Transition students will thrive in.
So far, the program has six students enrolled from schools around the district, all working four days a week at Overland.
The idea is to get students in the program around the time they graduate from high school and have them work in it for a couple years, he said.
“And hopefully get them into an interview, at minimum, on the way out,” he said.
And the industry is growing rapidly, in part because of laws like one in Colorado that makes it illegal to throw electronic waste in a landfill.
According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade group that represents a variety of recyclers, electronic recycling pumped less than $1 billion into the country’s economy in 2002. By 2011, that number had ballooned to more than $20 billion and Eric Harris, director of Government and International Affairs for the organization, said it has trended steadily upward since.
“E-scrap is the fastest growing sector of the recycling industry,” he said.
And while the industry employed just 6,000 people in its infancy in 2002, it had more than 45,000 employees by 2011.
Bill Morris, CEO of Blue Star, said his organization has worked with school districts for years and about one-third of his 20-person staff in Colorado Springs are disabled workers who were referred by a transitions program.
Morris said smaller school districts have similar efforts, but getting a complicated partnership off the ground at a big district has always been a major hurdle.
He said Judy Paukovich, an employment specialist with the CCSD transition program, mounted lengthy campaign to get the program going, efforts he said other districts will try to mirror.
“They are all waiting for the guinea pig to get going,” he said.
Zach Garcia, a Smoky Hill High School graduate, said he could see himself doing this for a living. As he used an electric screwdriver to free a few screws from his second computer of the day last week, the 19-year-old didn’t lack confidence in his recycling skills.
“I’d be really good at it,” he said, the screwdriver humming in his gloved hand. “I mean, I got it down.”
The title should have read, “Cherry Creek Schools in Aurora….” Not every special needs student in Aurora attends Cherry Creek School District. As a parent of a special needs student in APS, the title was very misleading.