We had great turnout at the press conference and hearing on recycling in NYC schools on Tuesday! Students, teachers and parents from MS 447, PS 19, Eleanor Roosevelt High School and Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School, Brooklyn New School and PS/IS 298 attended, many of them wearing our "Be cool. Recycle at school!" t-shirts. The event was covered by NY1, and Metro Paper (see below).

Much of Mr. Shear's, Chief of Staff for the Dept. of Education's Office of Finance and Administration, testimony does not reflect the experience of teachers inside schools. We are very disturbed by the Department of Education's lack of understanding and attention to this important issue. Our Committee will be responding to Mr. Shear's testimony. 

You might want to ask Mr. Shear if your school's recycling coordinator is included in their supposed list of 372. You can contact him at 212-374-0209.

You can read the testimony of the teacher, Coquille Houshour, who was invited to testify.

Please respond to the hearing by contacting your favorite media. We need to continue to bring attention to the bill and legislation and ensure they are passed.

Also, be sure to sign our petition. As soon as we get a substantial number of signatures, we'll present it to NYC councilmembers. As of today, 186 people have signed. We know more people care!

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School Recycling Scores Low Grade - Metro Paper

CITY HALL. The city's 1,400-plus public schools generate roughly 50,000 tons of garbage annually, but only 10 percent of it is recycled, according to City Council man Bill de Blasio — despite a 1989 local law requiring the recycling of 25 percent of the city's average daily waste stream.

"We see recycling happen sometimes," De Blasio said. "It happens when there are teachers, parents and custodians willing to go out of their way." He said eco-conscious teachers have to rely on grants or donations for recycling bins.

He introduced a bill yesterday to require the Department of Sanitation supply every public and private school with a sufficient number of bins and storage containers for recyclables, plus signs to encourage participation and weekly pickups.

The bill was "not necessary," DSNY's Robert Lange said at a Council hearing yesterday. His department already provides such services and has been working with schools for 19 years on implementing recycling, such as by giving schools decals to label any receptacle for recycling, he said. "Whether a school successfully recycles is ultimately the responsibility of the school community."

Who holds schools accountable? That would be a school's "recycling coordinator," who develops an annual school recycling plan, coordinates with the principal and custodian and reports whether the school is meeting its targets, said Jeffrey Shear, of the Department of Education.

Only 372 schools have such a position. "The level of recycling is undisputedly higher at these schools," Shear said, adding that this summer, the DOE plans to do outreach to ensure schools have a designated recycling coordinator. "We have more work to do," Shear said.

AMY ZIMMER, amy.zimmer@metro.us

Calling All NYC School Recycling Supporters!

City Hall wants to hear from us! And WE NEED YOUR HELP!

A Joint Committee hearing with the Dept. of Sanitation and the Dept. of Education on SCHOOL RECYCLING is set for TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1 PM. at City Hall.

Council member Bill De Blasio will be holding a pre-hearing press conference on the steps of CITY HALL at 12:15 PM. He'll announce a bill calling for school recycling programs in all NYC schools. Plus, he'll introduce legislation to bring back dumpster recycling collection (exactly what we've been asking for)!

Join us in showing the NYC Council how much we care!

Bring your teachers, students, parents and signs! Yes, it's a school day, but a wonderful opportunity to learn about our City's decision-making process. Council members McMahon, Jackson & others, NRDC, the Custodian and Cleaner's Unions will be there too!

We'll have "Be cool. Recycle at school!" t-shirts if you want to order some—they're only $5 (less if you order for your entire class)!

After the rally, the hearing takes place from 1-4 PM. The public is invited to attend.

This is critical moment: be there! And forward this far and wide!

Tired of using your old recycling can as a garbage bin? Always wanted to house a few industrious worms that won't scoff at cafeteria cuisine? Why not dress up your school's asphalt in the shade of green?

Here's your chance to develop a micro eco-culture.

Ford and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition are providing up to $250,000 in eco-friendly improvements to one lucky school. Complete the registration form and answer the question, "Why does your school deserve an eco-friendly makeover?" in 250 words or less by May 18. You could help make your school a greener, straight-up more conscientious place to be.

It's worth a try. You'll never know the fruit of a seed until you plant it. (And sometimes that takes a little dinero.)

If you haven't already registered, you may be out of luck. But try showing up and playing up your teacher profile and maybe they'll let you through the doors. (Come on, the break's almost over anyway.) Podcamp NYC 2.0, April 25-27, is focusing on education, and using new media to rethink and reimagine the way we learn--not only in school, but beyond. It's time to get inspired to work that SmartBoard like the machine it is.

The robust list of speakers is likely to knock you into a new orbit of thinking. Anna Beard's www.freereading.net, a wiki on reading curricula for you and your classroom, will help you say buh-bye to Wilson and Great Leaps. That kind of old-school is starting to feel like no-school.

Barbara Freeman, who teaches at Electronic Music & Audio Engineering at Greenwich High School, will be speaking on "Cashing in on Digital Distribution for Public Schools or 'The High Tech Bake Sale'". Learn about podcasting in the music classroom, and see examples of her students' podcasts. Get in the know about digital media content distribution, sales and how to using digital distribution as a fundraiser for your school program.

Kathy Shields, "Podcasting, Skypecasting, Webcasting and More for the Elementary Crowd," promises to help you maximize motivation by giving you and your students opportunities to interact globally. There's nothing like a little digitime to harness the promise of summer.

Be there or be square.

All you back-to-schoolers who missed Jonathon Kozol's fast, which began last summer as Congress geared up to reauthorize NCLB, can still dip into the controversy with Why I am Fasting: A Note to My Friends. And why not follow-up with a first hand account this Thursday, March 26, 2008 at Pace? He'll catch us up on his latest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, which is all about you—that is, if you're actively cultivating your irreverance for NCLB too.

Kozol, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood in Boston during the civil rights campaigns of the mid-60s and became a fourth grade teacher. Well-known for Amazing Grace, an expose on South Bronx schools, and then later for The Shame of the Nation, Kozol has a history of writing about the injustice in U.S. school systems. He also puts his mouth where his pen is, spending a lot of time in D.C. attempting to convince the Senate leadership to radically revise the punitive aspects of NCLB.

Pace University School of Education's sixth annual free lecture series, "The Current Status of Urban School Reform: What is Real?" is located at Pace's Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts from 6-8 p.m.

Also, don't miss the last speaker of the series, Deborah Meier, educational reformer, writer and activist, on “What’s the Big Fuss All About? What’s at Stake in the Latest Round of Educational Reform? A View from the Bottom” on April 16.

If you can't make Kozol or Meier, you can download the talks, along with all of the other speaker's lectures.

Who ever said teaching was cool? The theatrics employed to giddy-up interest and retention can be, well, lame. Not everyone can be in the zone five days a week, and when some of us think we're in it, our students make it clear we're out—way out—of it. So why not pass the buck and make a laughing stock of some other teach who's trying really, really hard to make it stick? (Remember: laughter is a powerful distraction from pain.) Mrs. Burk could do that for you. Easy.

But be careful. Ms. Robinson is so cool that after getting it down with her, your students will never listen to you again.

Either way, TeacherTube lets you step off the stage—or, if you want to expand your audience, you can project your teacher-virtuality far and wide. And given the proper paperwork, you could shine a spotlight on the real stars and make that student's science experiment that almost caught her lab partner's hair on fire school-famous.

Five educators, demonstrating leadership in technology and education, were awarded Pop!Tech Fellowships presented by Sun Microsystems and Curriki, a new open-source-focused educational foundation. Check out their discussion about the future of technology and education. Pop!Casts are an amazing resource for educators. They are available free of charge, and they're published under a Creative Commons license—meaning you can distribute, translate and edit them as you wish for noncommercial use. Share them with peers and students and inspire collective thinking and action around the topics you're most interested in. 

ThinkQuest just announced their 2008 "Internet Challenge," a free citywide competition for teams of NYC students, grades 3-12, developing innovative websites. Winning teams, their coaches and schools are awarded some quest-worthy treasures like laptop computers, digital cameras and $1000 gift certificates.

Teams who make it through the adventurous project (you don't have to worry about poisonous snakes) and win the goods will also receive citywide recognition. Plus, winning websites are published in the TWNYC library, which has a bunch of cool NYC student-created websites.

And don't forget those good ol' intrinsic rewards, which are why you do it all in the first place.

Named by Technology & Learning magazine as one of the "Top 10 Innovative Projects" in the country, ThinkQuest NYC's "Internet Challenge" offers a great opportunity for NYC teachers to help students cross the digital divide by integrating learning with technology. Students hone skills necessary to succeed in the 21st Century: web authoring, teamwork and collaboration, project management, creativity and research.

Thanks to the City Council's support for Project Chess, the awesome non-profit, Chess-in-the-Schools, is training hundreds of New York City public school teachers (elementary, middle and high school) to implement chess programs in their schools in all five boroughs with their new Teacher Training Institutes.

Sign-up for one of their free two-session weekend workshops before they fill up. You'll learn all the right moves, plus you'll receive free chess materials to get your students started. (They'll even train all you novices who lose before even sitting down.) Additional workshops will be scheduled throughout the school year according to demand, so if you don't get a spot, you haven't lost yet. And if you really want to be a knight in shining armor, you could request an in-school workshop if enough teachers in your school are interested.

Before deciding whether or not it's worth giving up two precious weekend days, remember: successful chess programs help students master skills needed for academic success (and maybe even increase scores on standardized tests).

Just go for it! The sooner you sign up, the sooner you can get your students to one of Chess-in-the-School's amazing chess tournaments. All you have to do is fill out their form and fax it to them. If you have any questions, you can shoot Eric Hutchins an email at tti@chessintheschools.org, or give him a call at 212-643-0225.

It's time to find a piece of earth and put some roots down. Take advantage of Arbor Day on April 27th as an opportunity to make NYC and our little Earth a cleaner, greener place, by doing a few of these little things:

Find a Location
If you talk with the Parks Department (contact someone in your borough's office), they might be willing to help you plant on school grounds or a neighborhood park! My students and I will be planting a park close to our school off the BQE to try and absorb some of those particulates that are giving our students asthma.
Get the Trees
If you join the National Arbor Day Foundation, you'll get 10 free trees. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has a School Seedling Program and you can get free trees or shrubs from them too! Talk with the Parks Department to decide which variety is best for your location. You can request a street tree from the City, but that can take awhile.
Extend the Activity
The Arbor Day Foundation has a bunch of free materials for teachers. They also have great resources for kids. Leaf Miner is fun for any age. And "The Giving Tree" (HarperCollins) and "Miss Rumphius" (Barbara Cooney) are good lessons on victory over tribulation.
Get Famous
The NYSDEC has a National Arbor Day poster contest for fifth grade students.
Just enjoy getting your hands dirty!