I was skeptical as I watched hundreds of loud and rowdy elementary school kids bounce into the school cafeteria of Rio Real School in Oxnard last Tuesday.
My skepticism grew as the students packed in tightly to on-floor seating while teachers retreated to standing positions in the rear of the room.
How could a message about reducing and recycling food waste possibly reach these students? Would the EcoHero assembly, sponsored by Ventura County’s Integrated Waste Management Division, be a well-intentioned flop, drowned out by the chatter of dozens of kids who would rather be on the playground?
Amazingly, the EcoHero presenter grabbed and held the kids’ attention. Occasional subsequent eruptions of distraction threatened her 40-minute show, but she consistently re-grabbed and held the kids’ attention longer every time. The team of EcoHero presenters, from a for-profit educational company, are identified by made-up names, starting with the word “Eco,” and the presenter on this day gave us a clue about her real name. She went by “Eco Sasha.”
Eco Sasha’s most relied-upon method was one many of us conducting public outreach have used for years when faced with a room full of children making noise. Into a microphone, she shouted above the din: “If you can hear me, clap your hands once!”
A thunderous sound followed, grabbing the attention of the kids who were drifting off or engaged in their own conversations.
She followed it up with a trick I had not seen before. Jumping into the pause created by the clap, she shouted, just as loud as her first instruction: “If you can hear me, waterfall!”
With that, she raised her hands and dropped them slowly in front of her, wiggling her fingers and making the “Shhh!” sound. That might be a rough approximation of the sound of a waterfall, but as several dozen eager kids quickly figured out what she was doing and joined her, it worked to replace the sound of a hundred juvenile conversations with a calming and pervasive sound asking for quiet.
Those tricks worked for her consistently because her show earned respect from a critical mass of kids. As she impressed the kids with call-and-response chants, clever and easy-to-repeat-and-perform songs, involvement of volunteers from the audience and funky dance moves, a growing number of her audience members became eager to see and hear what she would do next.
She followed up with a participatory song-and-dance about “ugly food,” emphasizing the difference between spoiled food, which is not good to eat, and food rejected just because it is oddly shaped or colored.
The presentation moved on to a “trivia contest” in which students determined which items do and do not belong in compost bins or curbside organics carts.
At ecoheroshow.com, schools in Ventura County’s unincorporated areas, outside cities, can book this EcoHero Show for free, sponsored by Ventura County Public Works. Schools countywide can arrange for a similarly impressive show focusing on stormwater pollution prevention sponsored by the Watersheds Coalition of Ventura County. Schools in Simi Valley can arrange for a great show focusing on bottles, cans and avoiding litter of material such as plastics.
Avoiding litter and reducing single-use plastics were also problems recently addressed by some real elementary school eco-heroes.
Students in Emily Noel’s and Flow Hansmeier’s fourth grade class at Ventura Charter School calculated the school’s lunches resulted in the discard of 4,320 plastic utensils per month and started a campaign to reduce the waste.
They created a video and coordinated other outreach, urging fellow students to bring their own reusable utensils. Parents and teachers joined the effort, buying metal utensils from thrift stores, providing those for students who did not bring their own and washing the utensils after meals.
You can learn more about these activist students at EcoFest, a public Earth Day event hosted by the Ventura Charter School from 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. on April 28 at 2060 Cameron St. in Ventura.
