Phoenixville, PA – Going green earned students at the Center for Arts & Technology Pickering Campus a first place finish in the Pennsylvania State DECA Competition. Going green was the theme of the year-long public relations campaign initiated by students in the school’s DECA chapter, an international association of high school and college students studying marketing, management, entrepreneurship, finance, hospitality, sales and service.
In September, DECA students at CAT Pickering began managing their school’s recycling program, according to DECA advisor and business teacher Jane Hesson.
“Each year, students in DECA take on a community service project,” said Hesson. “We had a recycling program in place but students and staff were not participating fully, so we decided to launch the CAT Goes Green project as our initiative.”
To excite people about the project, students launched a full-scale marketing campaign, including creating a video with tips on how to conserve energy and the importance of recycling; hanging posters throughout the school; hosting a special all-school assembly; and having the environmentally-focused documentaries “An Inconvenient Truth,” Dimming the Sun,” and “Planet in Crisis” shown in all the school’s social study classes.
According to student organizers, the recycling project was slow to catch on but now the majority of students and staff are participating.
“At first it was very weak,” said T.C. Hickey, DECA president. “ We would watch the students and sometimes they would use the recycling bins and sometimes they wouldn’t, or they would put regular trash in the recycling bins instead of the trash cans, but after we started explaining the impact that just a few small changes can have, people began to catch on.”
Since it is the responsibility of DECA students to empty the recycling bins located in every classroom, they are able to see first hand the impact they have had in a very short time.
Students are glad their hard work is paying off and are planning to increase their recycling efforts.
“Right now we are just recycling paper, but we hope to add plastic containers such as soda bottles,” said 11th grader Melanie Borrilez. “Eventually, I would like our school to become a community recycling drop off center, so that people who do not
have regular recycling pick ups, can drop off their paper and plastic products at our school.”
Classmate Brianna Buckwalter also hopes that the “CAT Goes Green” project has a lasting impact: “I want it to become second nature, something that people don’t think about. They just know to recycle, to use coffee mugs instead of Styrofoam cups, to have reusable lunch bags instead of brown paper bags and to use compact fluorescent lightbulbs instead of traditional light bulbs.”
Borrilez agreed: “I want it (going green) to become part of our school culture.”
Hickey, Borrilez and Buckwalter presented the “CAT Goes Green” campaign at the DECA Pennsylvania State Competition in February. They were among 1500 students from across the commonwealth to attend the statewide conference. Their first finished earned them the right to compete at the national conference in Alanta, GA in April.
“I think what really made our project stand out was that it was group effort,” said Hesson, “The whole club was involved and eventually the whole school - students, teachers, custodians – everyone worked together to make this a success.”
According to Hesson, projects like this are extremely beneficial because they allow students to apply classroom theory to real-life applications.
“It’s a perfect companion piece to the curriculum,” said Hesson. “They (students) learn how to make brochures and to give presentations, and how to launch effective campaigns in class, but projects like this allow the students to apply what they have learned to a real-life situation to solve an important problem. And surprise, surprise - it worked!”
