Our In-School Composting Program
Even in these humble things, we catch little glimpses of redemption.
There’s a small brick corridor outside of CCA’s upper school, jammed between an old service entrance and an exterior wall. It’s always been an ugly and unassuming space that bore all the hallmarks of disuse: discarded papers drifting in the corners, piles of cardboard waiting to be hauled off to the dumpster, and birds’ nests bristling from the eves. Historically, not much has happened there—on any given day, you might have seen a teacher darting out to their car for a forgotten coffee mug, scattering a few house sparrows as they slammed open the door, or heard trumpet music drifting above the walls as a music instructor, tempted outside by fine weather, took advantage of the acoustics to hold the session in the open air.
But all of this changed the year we started the Classical Roots Program because that particular corner of the campus, with its relative shelter and shade, made the perfect place for a multi-stage composting center. For the last three years, it’s housed a living, growing pile of compost that’s fed almost exclusively by classroom waste.
As you can imagine, it took some doing for me to convince the administration that keeping a pile of decomposing organic matter outside of one of our school entrances, as obscure as that entrance might be, was a good idea. There were the usual unfounded fears about smell, about rodents. But in the end, neglect became my ally and permission was hesitatingly granted. A few wooden palates, found for free at a local farm and zip-tied together, did the trick. The pile has gone through many incarnations since, but with one constant: the amount we put into it has been on a steadily upward trend. The heap, along with our internal composting program, has been growing.
Why include such a program as part of the general efforts of Classical Roots? As a home organic gardener, I’m well acquainted with the value, even the necessity, of a good composting system that works alongside active growing spaces. The only alternative to composting the waste that such spaces inevitably produce is to throw it all away; an almost criminal notion that would mean our agriculture program actually made the school more wasteful.
And there was simply too much potential. According to one recent estimate by the World Wildlife Fund, plate waste from school cafeterias in the US alone probably totals around 530,000 tons per year. But that staggering total can become a cause for optimism if we consider the notion that, with a little organization and effort, a significant portion of such waste could be turned into organic compost—compost that never has to be hauled anywhere via truck and can be used to reinvigorate the local soil.
Our effort started humbly enough: a few cheap but handsome composting receptacles in three classrooms: one each in the Grammar, Middle, and Upper Schools. We slapped a Classical Roots sticker on each of them and, for good measure, included a cheap paper shredder for discarded homework and old quizzes. Over the following week, a few of my student volunteers visited these classrooms (with a jar of finished compost in hand) and hyped the program, discussing the benefits of composting, defining what should and should not be composted, linking the whole notion to the stewardship of creation, and finally taking each class to the composting center so they could watch the process in action. The Grammar School students were especially enamored with it all, and who could blame them? It’s hard not to be entranced by this everyday alchemy that transforms old cucumbers, banana peels, and lesson plans into heaps of fertilizer that smell like a cool forest floor in October and literally teem with microscopic life. After that, we just kept a stockpile of extra buckets and shredders on hand and, whenever a teacher approached us about joining the program, we furnished them with the supplies and sent our emissaries during a free period to educate their students.
It turns out that a school makes a shockingly effective engine for producing piles and piles of organic compost. As any gardener knows, the great tragedy of compost is that no garden can produce enough of it to supply its own demands. Even cutting things very fine, the most I’ve been able to squeeze out of my home system amounts to about a quarter of my annual mulching needs.
But there are no such limitations on a school composting program. Consider for a moment just how many apple cores, carrot tops, cardboard boxes, and old papers a school discards every week. If even a portion of that enormity can be collected and properly mixed, the results are impressive. As of this writing, I’d imagine that about an eighth of the classrooms here at CCA contain composting buckets. Between these classrooms and the larger bucket in our cafeteria, we collect thirty to forty pounds of compostable material per week. When mixed with the paper from our shredders, these scraps break down wonderfully, producing a nearly constant stream of good mulch for our various garden spaces. Indeed, just this week, we were able to finish mulching all twenty-seven of our orchard trees from our supply without exhausting it. By the end of winter, we’ll have twice as much again to work with. It’s a prodigious success, and it’s only beginning.
This morning I took another load of shredded paper out to the heap. It’s become a routine for me, when I first arrive at school, to take yesterday’s scraps out to the little corridor and stir them into the pile, watching the steam of a trillion organisms huff into the air when I sink in the fork. Often enough, a busy parent, heading back to their car after dropping someone off, will stop by for a chat. Many of them tell me that they’ve been inspired by our efforts here to start composting at home. That in and of itself is a marker of success. But there’s another layer to the magic, too. For me and for these parents, this ugly little heap in a discarded corner of the school has become a place to pause and linger and consider the generosity of soil. Not everything about a garden is pretty to look at but, even in these humble things, we can catch little glimpses of redemption.
