Local school cleans up for Earth Day, by Nathan Weiser

On the day before Earth Day, Harbor Middle School did their part to clean up the area around the school.

The Green Team did a Beautify the Block activity where they did a loop around the perimeter of the school picking up trash. Each student got gloves and a plastic bag and they shared a plastic picker to pick up trash that was hard to reach.

After they all got a plastic bag and gloves, they went up Huntington Street, took a left on Hicks Street and took another left on Nelson Street.

The students in the Green Team enthusiastically stopped at each tree bed on the sidewalk and picked up all of the trash that had accumulated. In addition to the many tree beds, they picked up any trash that was on the sidewalk or next to the gate.

Once they went down Nelson Street, there was a lot of trash to pick up inside of the school yard.

They used their tools to pick up trash inside the fence that they could not pick up from the sidewalk.

There was also trash in an area of the school yard closer to the school building next to where there is a mural that the Green Team had done before.

They picked up a lot of snack bags, cans, wrappers, bottles, scrap paper and other garbage from the sidewalk and school yard.

When they made it back to the entrance of the school building after continuing to walk down Columbia Street and back up Huntington Street, everyone had filled up a total of 13 plastic bags. All of the bags were put into a big clear trash bag.

After finishing their Beautify the Block activity, everyone on the Green Team got a new water bottle and an Earth Day magnet. The students were told that they made a big difference.

The Green Team does a lot of activities to clean the environment or bring awareness to it.

According to a club advisor, Haneen Omari, who is a STEAM educator with RETI Center, they have collected marine animals from Billion Oyster Project’s cages at Valentino Pier for the school’s aquarium in the Harbor Lab to learn about marine life.

Another green activity has included doing soil testing and water quality testing in conjunction with discovering microbial life in the water (algae, small crustaceans).