AURORA | This school year at Aurora West College Preparatory Academy, change is occurring one plate of breakfast at a time.
Well, make that one crate at a time.
Equipped with a cache of black milk crates, a coalition of Aurora West students is changing how food is consumed and, more importantly, discarded at the school.
“We just got together and thought of ideas about how we could make our school more sustainable,” said Pedro Reynaldo, a junior at West and co-chair of the CHOICES Club, which has worked to reshape how teachers, administrators and students interact with the surrounding community and the environment. “And it wasn’t really focused on recycling or food waste, it was just sustainability as a whole.”
Reynaldo and fellow CHOICES co-chair Jorge Pelayo joined the club — which is an acronym for Committed to How Our Choices Impact Community Environment in School — as freshmen in order to fill an extracurricular requirement for a freshman physics class.
But when the class ended and most students quit the club because it was no longer mandatory, both Reynaldo and Pelayo stuck around to expand upon the recycling and energy reduction programs they had helped get off the ground.
“We saw the potential that (the club) could have, and as our relationship with (instructors) grew, so did our interest,” Pelayo said.
That investment in the club, their teachers and their peers came to fruition at the beginning of this school year when CHOICES started a food waste reduction program that collects unused breakfast food and donates it to area shelters and food banks. In cooperation with the school’s cafeteria personnel and Denver nonprofit We Don’t Waste, CHOICES members are able to collect unwanted food from the federally funded Breakfast in the Classroom program and load it onto semi trucks that come to the school twice a week. Driven by We Don’t Waste employees, the trucks then drive the food, which typically includes burritos, sliced fruit, milk and cereal, to dozens of partner organizations across the metro region, according to Arlan Preblud, executive director of We Don’t Waste.
“We started picking up from the school on a regular basis in August and it’s proved, for us, to be very, very successful,” Preblud said. “We’ve picked up (more than) 37,000 servings of food from the school so far.”
Fleshing out the program’s multi-faceted modes of operation started last spring when Pelayo, Reynaldo and CHOICES staff supervisor Alexa Davis approached Preblud about a potential partnership. Preblud then had the students complete a needs-based survey and consulted with Mona Martinez-Brosh, director of nutrition services for APS, to find out if a team-up would be logistically possible.
“We had to develop a plan to see if we could even implement the program,” Martinez-Brosh said. “But because we are the individuals serving the food, we are able to deal with the leftovers in a much more responsible way. And the food that were donating…we aren’t able to reserve in our own programs for regulatory reasons, but it’s perfectly fine for us to repurpose it to Arlan.”
The food waste program is only the latest CHOICES triumph, however, as the club has raked in about $10,000 in grant awards for other efforts over the course of the past two years. The bulk of that total came from an $8,500 award granted by the district’s Green Stars Renewed challenge, which has a goal of reducing APS natural resource consumption by 15 percent by 2018. And while CHOICES is using some of that total for administrative fees, the club has divvied up most of the pot for new equipment for teachers and other student organizations at West.
Davis, who founded CHOICES shortly after she began working at West in March 2014, said that she’s seen a profound change in how club members view and interact with the environment.
“I think it’s really opened up their eyes,” said Davis, who is also the registrar at West. “I hear all the time, ‘don’t they know that this doesn’t go in the recycling?’ But had you asked these kids that two years ago, they would have said, ‘I don’t know what goes in recycling.’ So they’re picking up so much, and I’m really proud of them.”
A graduate of Metropolitan State University of Denver with a degree in sustainable planning, Davis said that simply making students aware of environmentalism and conservation has been immensely beneficial.
“Sustainability, recovery and resource conservation are huge fields, and it would be doing them a disservice to not expose them to those things,” she said. “And even if they’re not looking for advanced degree positions, there are still a lot of technical jobs out there, and I want to expose them to that. I think exposure is huge.”