The St. Petersburg Times Newspapers In Education Program graciously donates newspapers to Pinellas County Schools for classroom use to make students more aware of current events and the relevance to their classes. It's a great tool, but a tremendous amount of waste if not recycled.
The band boosters already had a recyclable bin for newspapers on campus for the community and teachers that brought their newspapers from home so The Ecology Club just had to develop a process to get the used newspapers from classrooms to the bin weekly.
Our maintenance and custodial staff is one of the best in the state and they were more than willing to help out in any way that they could. Although it hampered their efforts somewhat, one day a week they were willing to allow us to use one of their golf carts to transport the papers from the different wings of the school. Boca Ciega High School's campus is expansive and without the use of the cart, the collection would take days.
One day a week, immediately following the last period of the day, Ecology Club members meet to transport the newspapers to the recycle bin. The custodial staff does without the use of the cart during one of the busiest times of the day, but it's never been an issue because they can see the benefit to the participating students. Having students provide the leg-work allows them to participate in making a difference for our community.
 We started having teachers place the newspapers outside their doors, but that was an immediate disaster as you might expect. Although the papers come banded from the St. Pete Times, they leave in disarray. We didn't make many friends that first week when the wind distributed newspapers over the entire campus. Club members were great and spent the extra time in cleaning up, but there was no way it could happen again.
We contacted The City of Gulfport to see if they could do anything to help and they immediately put us in touch with Doug Addis, the director of streets and sanitation. Doug met with me the very next day and said that they would be excited to help in any way that they could. He directed me to the public works building where I was promptly given thirty of their blue recycle bins with a note to let me know if we needed more.
Thanks to the support of our teachers and willingness of Ecology Club members to participate I have been back a couple of times.
We would like to thank The St. Petersburg Times, Newspapers in Education, The City of Gulfport, particularly Doug Addis, the Boca Ciega High School maintenance and custodial staff under the direction of Chuck Yero, HPO and mostly BCHS teachers and students for allowing us to participate in such a valuable service to our community.
Below are a few pictures of our most recent effort. Ecology Club members rotate responsibilities for the newspaper collection. All proceeds from the newspaper collections benefit the BCHS Band Boosters.
 
 
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