NFA marine science students clean Norwich waterfront for holiday weekend
Norwich — If the Norwich harbor and the Washington Street areas seem a little cleaner this weekend, thank the Coastal Studies class at Norwich Free Academy and the Last Green Valley.
Marine sciences teacher Seth Yarish received a $500 grant from the Last Green Valley, the region’s National Heritage Corridor agency, to have students conduct garbage cleanups and record the trash and debris they find along their chosen routes. Two classes thus far have done three cleanup sessions on the grounds outside NFA, the streets heading to Norwich harbor and at the Marina at American Wharf and Howard T. Brown Memorial Park.
On Wednesday, 17 students in tenth through twelfth grades donned blue plastic gloves and carried garbage bags as they made their way to the city’s waterfront.
The tally when they reached the marina included: 16 small “nip” alcohol bottles, several plastic drinking cups and plastic bottles, a large plastic mug, a CD, some wire, a deflated pink “Happy Birthday” balloon, a hubcap, a bolt, a fork and a spoon and too many cigarette butts.
“I stopped tallying those,” senior Rohan Hanson of Norwich said of the cigarette butts. He held a clipboard with tally sheets.
The group also found one syringe, an item students are not allowed to pick up.
“I got that one,” said teaching intern Josh Fish, a 2010 NFA graduate now working on his teaching certificate at Sacred Heart University. He was a student in Yarish’s class several years ago.
At the harbor, Wednesday’s brisk wind kept some flying debris out of the students’ hands, as a coffee cup lid, paper and other small items drifted past.
“A lot of the garbage we saw would wash into the water and end up in Long Island Sound,” Yarish told the students.
He asked the class to repeat a motto learned this year: “Everyone has their own address, but we all share the same ecological address.”
The Coastal Studies class did an earlier cleanup around the NFA campus, and there the dominant item was cigarette butts at more than 100, the students said. That led to a classroom discussion of how and why it became OK for people to throw cigarette butts on the ground. Major intersections with red lights along the route to the harbor were littered with butts.
At one of the docks at the marina, seniors Andrew Kinney of Preston, Destiny Jones of Norwich and Kamryn Grace of Chaplin had a different mission. They were in charge of conducting the NFA marine sciences class’ weekly water quality test, dropping a sensor into the water. A wire attached to the sensor was connected to a hand-held recording device. The students recorded figures at different depths until they reached the bottom, 8 meters down.
The class then walked across the Route 82 bridge to Brown Park to finish the trash collection, have pizza at La Stella’s restaurant and ice cream at the new Friendly’s Scoop Shack at the park before walking back up the hill to NFA.
Asked about their efforts, several students said they felt their cleanup was making a difference.
“Someone has to start somewhere to clean it,” sophomore Jayson Diaz of Norwich said.
Senior Darnell Bartha of Preston wondered why carmakers haven’t designed a built-in garbage can or bag holder in vehicles.
“Instead of making a second glove compartment, they should make a garbage compartment,” he said.
c.bessette@theday.com
Twitter: @Bessettetheday
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