Schoolchildren Earth Day bag message in colors

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Schoolchildren Earth Day bag message in colors

Kids at Arbor Heights decorate grocery bags

Saturday, April 22, 2000

By REBEKAH DENN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

It's fitting that an educational Earth Day event began at a school called Arbor Heights.

Students at the southwest Seattle elementary school delivered 432 colorful grocery bags to their local Safeway yesterday, decorated with drawings of Earth and slogans ranging from "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to "Don't Pollute!"

It's even more fitting that the annual Earth Day Groceries Project, which began at Arbor Heights in 1994, has since spread around the Earth.

With the help of a teacher who was an early convert to e-mail and the Internet, students from 1,200 schools, including ones as far away as Japan and Brazil, joined Arbor Heights in the project last year. An even larger number is expected when this year's tallies are complete.

Jim Cho, 8, and his Arbor Heights' classmates deliver more than 400 decorated grocery bags to a Safeway store eight blocks from the school.Scott Eklund/P-I

"We decorated 500 bags!" a teacher from Trinidad wrote on the project's Web site (www.earthdaybags.org) this week.

Arbor Heights teacher Mark Ahlness began the project after hearing the idea at a Seattle Public Schools workshop. He thought it would be a way to make students more environmentally aware and to share their work with the community.

Students borrow paper bags from participating markets, decorate them and then return them to be filled with groceries for Earth Day shoppers.

Ahlness, who created one of the first school Web sites in the country at Arbor Heights, suggested that other schools share in the project, first by posting notices on educational electronic bulletin boards and then on Internet sites.

It has expanded to a level he never imagined, with the number of decorated bags recorded on the Web site rising from 13,000 in 1994 to 400,000 last year.

Teachers have also worked other lessons around the recycling and public awareness message. In Ahlness' class, for instance, students learn geography by reading messages from other participating schools and marking the schools' towns on a giant U.S. map in the school hallway.

Students at Sacred Heart Elementary in Bellevue decorated 597 bags this year and created PowerPoint demonstrations to explain the project. Yesterday at Arbor Heights, student "ambassadors" in Ahlness' class were thrilled to gather up the stacks of decorated bags and march down the street to the store. Along the way, the third-graders took turns balancing a great blue globe nearly as large as they are.

Student Amelia Lanfrankie did some quick long division to calculate how many bags each student would have to carry and made sure an especially nice one showed at the top of her pile.

Students mainly used colored pencils and markers to complete their pictures, showing blue and green (and occasionally purple) globes, along with trees, sunny skies and smiling stick-figure people.

"Not a lot of people (used) crayons, because you can't recycle crayons," explained student Maryetta Parsons-Tinnermon.

As they reached the grocery store, manager Bob Stapleton gladly stacked up the bags and gave each student a goodie bag (recyclable) with a soda (recyclable cans) and snacks (not-so-recyclable packaging).

They gave him a big thank you in return and dug into the treats.

"No littering," teacher Ahlness warned. Of course not!

P-I reporter Rebekah Denn can be reached at 206-448-8190 or rebekahdenn@seattle-pi.com