For elementary school students, recess is a time to run, play and socialize on the school playground. But for a group of second-grade students at Beachwood’s Bryden Elementary School, recess looks a little different.
Every Wednesday and Friday, 8-year-old Shin Hashiba brings tongs and buckets made from recycled plastic water jugs with him to school. During recess, he passes them out to other second-grade students who signed up to participate in Bryden’s Save-the-Earth Club.
During recess, the students wander the playground looking for trash. They use the tongs and buckets to collect each piece and talk to each other about why it ended up on their playground. When recess ends, they then dump their collected litter into trash cans to be disposed of properly.
“So, I feel that this playground got better,” he said.
At the beginning of the school year, Shin founded Bryden’s Save-the-Earth Club after his teacher, Ellen Margulies, gave her weekly "Mindset Monday" lesson to Shin and her other students.
“Every Monday we do something called a 'Mindset Monday,' where we set a mindful purpose on how we're going to react and take care of things that week,” Margulies said. “Our mindset Monday that one week was how we can make a positive change in the world.”
Inspired by that lesson, Shin went home and asked himself an important question.
“I asked myself, ‘What do I have the power to create change?’” he said.
He created a PowerPoint presentation and sent it to Margulies advocating for a Save-the-Earth Club at Bryden.
“By Sunday morning, I checked my emails at home and Shin had sent me a PowerPoint of how he wanted to develop this club,” Margulies said, “and every reason in the world he would think that he could change the world and make it a better place, and how he was going to get his classmates to help him.”
Afterward, he gave the same presentation to Bryden’s Principal, Arianna DeGeorge, who allowed Shin to present it to the second-grade classes, and encourage his peers to volunteer to help him.
“It was just so sweet because everything was fully prepared and he just spent his own time doing it, which I think is so special,” DeGeorge said. “He just had his passion and he said, ‘I'm going to change the world, I'm going to do this and I have all these ideas and I'm going to use people to kind of help me follow suit.’”
Shin peaked 7-year-old Haiqa Ejaz’s interest the moment he stepped onto the school bus with his cleanup supplies.
“I saw bags, and there was, like, buckets and tweezers and shovels there,” she said. “So, when we were at recess, I asked him [about] the Save-the-Earth club.”
Shin’s classmate, 7-year-old Claire Matthews, felt inspired after seeing the presentation, and said she knew she wanted to help out.
“He gave a presentation, and I saw it, and I wanted to join because I wanted my kids to have a nice place to grow up,” she said.
Dominic Licatalosi wanted to join after seeing other students in the club picking up litter during recess. But he had to wait until Shin presented to his class to sign up.
After seeing Shin’s presentation, he was sold on the importance of picking up litter left on the ground.
“I just want everybody to know that if people [keep] littering, one day there will be trash everywhere.”Shin Hashiba
“Like if I had the option to present to my class, then I would say that more people should sign up to help the earth be a better environment for people,” Dominic said.
Other students joined because they saw their friends participating, and use the Save-the-Earth club as a way to spend time together during recess.
Since joining, 7-year-old animal lover Jason Kao gained an understanding of how trash can impact plants and animals.
“If not that much people clean up, like if there's only two or three, the earth may be filled up with trash,” Jason said. “And then one day the earth might be very stinky and lots of animals will go extinct.”
Jason inspired his friend, Gryffin Wu, to join too. The two work together to find and collect litter on their playground.
“My favorite part is that I get to do it with my friend Jason,” he said.
Coming off of the COVID-19 pandemic, Margulies said she noticed her students had a harder time connecting with one another. But Shin’s club gives them an easy way to get involved and make new friends.
'I know that that sounds like a cliché, but the kids really had to learn how to re socialize all over again and how to share and and really support their friend," Margulies said. "A lot of kids were really doing this because they care a lot about Shin and they knew that this was an important cause. And then in turn, it became important to them."
The number of the students in the club fluctuates as the year goes on, but Shin is there each clean-up day with his supplies, ready to hand them out to students willing to participate.
Some days they find more trash than others. Eight-year-old Patrick Srithai said he likes when it’s hard to find litter on the playground.
“I like when … you don't see trash everywhere, so it's like a treasure hunt,” he said. “For the last few weeks, we haven't been seeing a lot of trash.”
Shin knows what to expect when they do find trash.
“Like snack bars and candies, maybe ripped sponge or plastic bags,” he said. “I mostly see broken pencils.”
Sometimes they’ll find plastic wrapped around sticks or plants. In that case, the students will spend time removing the trash from the organic material and returning that back to nature.
Shin keeps track of the number of buckets they fill during each cleanup. He said they fill between five and 15 buckets each time, and estimates they’ve filled about 135 so far.
DeGeorge said she feels inspired seeing the students turn to one another to learn, help the environment and make friends.
“You think of a second grader, a first grader, of a [kindergartener] being able to do big things like this,” she said. “But we need to know that our kids, we have high expectations for them, and if we give them all these different opportunities, and they really step up and can do some incredible things.”
Shin’s Save-the-Earth Club provides Bryden’s second grade students with an easy way to make new friends, or bond with old ones, all while making their corner of the world a better place.
His goal is a simple one: “I just want everybody to know that if people [keep] littering, one day there will be trash everywhere.”
