By Billie Nagy

I’m going to paint a little picture for you. It’s a bright and beautiful Monday morning (because we all know that’s the truth) and you’re walking into school right past the lunch store. You look up to say “hi” to a friend, and before you’ve even (as William Prescott famously yelled) seen “the whites of their eyes”… “SQUISH!” You’ve just stepped on a carton of Nutella from the previous day’s lunch that nobody bothered to pick up and throw away. A droplet gushed onto your shoe, and now it’s going to be an even better Monday.

Okay, so maybe that’s somewhat exaggerated, but in all honesty, it is something we need to address. Everyone, let’s talk about trash. Yes, trash. It seems as though everywhere we walk around campus there is somehow and somewhere a little piece of something, whether it be school supplies, leftover wrappers from lunch, or — I don’t even know how it’s possible — a half squished banana smeared on an outdoor table. Yuck.

It seems as though garbage sporadically sitting upon the ground, tables, benches, and by the lockers from lunch is one of those white elephants in the room. Everyone notices and wishes it wasn’t there, but nobody really bothers to do anything about it, and if they do, they’re either a great kid, faculty member, or parent, or, they are forced to for five minutes every day for a week as proclaimed by their teacher.

Because Tempe Prep is an amazing school with outstanding faculty where students can receive an incredible education, it seems a bit crazy to me that we (as a whole) do not try to hold the same level of respect and admiration for our campus. Though our campus itself is lovely, it’s usually a bit dirty, especially after lunch.

In order to get some opinions on the matter, I talked with the members of the Environmental Club. As junior Nizhoni Saenz notes, “It’s quite unfortunate to see trash lying around the school. It damages the reputation our school has and makes us feel, well… trashy.”

In agreement, junior Christina Ortiz remarks, “It is a respectable school; as such, we should all feel inclined to make it as clean as Disneyland!”

In an effort to beautify the campus, the club came up with a few ideas for the future on how faculty could possibly help improve students’ motivation and how merely moving trash cans around to more efficient and effective positions can lead to improvements in campus cleanliness.

As juniors Marisa Bennett and Claire Meacham suggest, “Perhaps there would be a greater incentive among students to pick up the trash around if teachers give accommodations to students when they see them doing the good deed and if a certain amount of accommodations led to a small reward for the student. Or perhaps, accommodations could cancel out warnings.” They also believe that “Periodically moving the trash cans around, especially having one in the pit area during lunch and by the basketball court again, would definitely help to solve some of the leftover trash problem. By having a can in the pit, carelessness would decrease and it would encourage students to be more mindful about their choices.”

Speaking of trash cans, the club is pondering plans for possibly having a portable compost bin during lunch for students to discard their decomposable wastes. The club has a compost bin already at the faculty house, but they believe that having it out in the main lunch areas would allow for less fruit and vegetable waste lying around.

All in all, we should be proud of our great school, and one of the ways to show our pride and appreciation is to make sure that we clean up not only our own, but any other garbage we see lying around. As a last reminder, if you see that dreaded Nutella carton lying around, please do us all a favor and throw it away. You never know how unintentionally grateful that distracted someone who doesn’t step on it might be. And maybe, just maybe, they could be for once happy on a Monday.