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Students double track fund with recycling award
By Elise Franco
Canfield
Students at Canfield Middle School have doubled the fund for a new track, thanks to a $5,000 recycling-challenge award from the National Conference of Mayors.
Jo Taylor, seventh- and eight-grade principal, said Canfield was honored this year with second place for the most creative and innovative recycling project for its effort, called “CSI: Can Scene Investigation.”
“It was a huge honor,” Taylor said. “It was pretty amazing when they called to let us know we’d won.”
Vicki Latimer, middle-school teacher, said the students have been participating in recycling projects since 2006 to raise enough money to replace the middle-school track. Latimer said this most-recent award, which was a national prize, brought the total amount of money collected to $13,000.
“It’s pretty phenomenal,” she said. “These kids bring in bags of cans year-round.”
Taylor said they’ll need about $25,000 to resurface the track, which will be made out of recycled tires.
Though the CSI theme was Latimer’s idea, she said the students had a big hand in bringing home the prize.
“We thought some cans had disappeared, and we all watch some of those crime shows,” Latimer said. “It was like, ‘We have to find the cans.’”
She said for one month last fall, students dropped bags of cans at the “evidence lock-up,” more commonly known as the large recycling trash bin.
Latimer said students made and hung signs and banners promoting the effort through the CSI theme and went as far as drawing chalk outlines of “missing” aluminum cans on the sidewalk outside the school.
“These kids have really been phenomenal,” she said.
This school year Canfield also won first-place in a recycling contest through the Mahoning County Green Team. Latimer said students raised $1,504 by bringing in 3,125 pounds of cans.
“It’s all about them,” she said. “They raised that $13,000 through their own efforts.”