Tired of seeing trash on the beach? The Kapa‘a Middle School seventh-grade service-learning class came up with an idea to clean beaches and parks for Earth Day.
The seventh-grade green team split up into three groups and each group decided which beach or park they wanted to go to for a field trip. The three areas were Hanalei, Anahola and New Town Park.
They conducted a service learning project for an excursion to clean up a Hanalei beach, Anahola Beach Park, and New Town Park. One group of students went to Kapa‘a New Town Park and gathered data of all the trash that was collected. Some of what they found included 43 bottle caps, 91 food wrappers, 198 pieces of broken glass, 15 slippers and a whopping 235 cigarette butts on the baseball field. They weighed the trash and calculated how much of a certain item they had. They were surprised to find so many cigarette butts.
The other students went to go to Anahola Beach Park where they found three times as many butts — 628.
Forty-five students went to Hanalei. That group collected 221 cigarette butts, 55 bottle caps, as well as plastic bags, food wrappers, beer bottles, broken glass, plastic, fiberglass and slippers.
During the one-hour Kaua‘i beach clean-up there were approximately 100 pounds of trash collected in all. There were over a hundred students who participated in this one-day clean-up.
The students in the seventh-grade service learning class are: J.R. Quilos, Jason Viernes, Mason Mendoza, Kelly Kikumoto, Mia Cabulisan, Sara Agoot, Guia Karlene Soriano, Reese Hicks-Whetsel, Kamalani Brun, Macie Simonishi, Corey Emproso, Lisetanne Scherschel, Kaikea Elias, and Keliikoa Baclayon. Debra Gochros is credited with making this project happen.
