5/29/2007 9:34:00 AM Church group salvages
items from end-of-year cleanup
Prescott High School student Amelia Sedan, right, her mother PHS teacher Helen Stephenson, and Amelia’s sister Stephanie Sedan work Saturday at the Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church to sort through bags of items PHS students left behind at the end of the school year.
The Daily Courier/
Nathaniel Kastelic
PRESCOTT - Discouraged with students throwing away perfectly good supplies such as backpacks, pens, pencils and paper during their end-of-the-year locker cleanup, Prescott High School teacher Helen Stephenson decided to do something about it.
With the permission of PHS Principal Totsy McCraley, Stephenson this past week gathered dozens of 30-gallon-size black trash bags full of these items and went through the painstaking process of redeeming what was salvageable.
Stephenson and her daughter, Amelia Sedan, an incoming senior at PHS, were the first to approach McCraley, who thought it was a bright idea to redeem these items.
"All the teachers (at PHS) are sick and tired of the waste," Stephenson said. "It's really disgusting to see this much waste going on over here."
On Saturday afternoon Stephenson and four volunteers, including two of her daughters, removed seldom-worn jackets, backpacks, calculators, markers and blank notebooks, among other items, from the trash bags.
Stephenson hauled four loads of these bags in a full-size Ford pick-up from the high school to Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church, only a few blocks away from the school on 700 W. Rosser St.
She and her group separated the trash from the good stuff and placed the latter on tables inside a spacious back room at the church.
Stephenson and her volunteers will clean the backpacks they found, fill them with supplies and donate the end product to needy high school and junior high school students on the Hopi Reservation, whom the church supports in northern Arizona.
Early Saturday afternoon, not even a quarter of the way into their work, members of the group found 20 backpacks and some sweatshirts that had little to no wear.
"It's really discouraging to see this, mainly because there are kids in town who walk around in their parents' old clothes," said Angela Shelton, a 2004 PHS graduate who volunteered this past weekend.
Stephenson, a behavior coach for the high school's Pathways program, video-taped the group's work so she could show it to students during the next academic year in hopes of generating awareness about the problem.
"I haven't bought school supplies for my kids since I started working at Prescott High School (in 2000) because at the end of the year I just go through the trash," Stephenson said. "A lot of teachers do that."
Amelia, 17, hopes to encourage PHS's recycling club to start providing cardboard donation boxes to the school at the end of every academic year where students could drop off their unwanted backpacks and jackets. Trash would go into another set of cardboard boxes, cutting the amount of waste in half.
"It's really interesting to notice how much people do throw away," Amelia said. "This experience has taught me not to be wasteful. If you see somebody throwing something away that's useful, tell them that you can use it."
