When walking around East High School, messes are everywhere. East High School Instagram accounts have posted about this issue, the student government has tried to fix it as well, but why does this happen? Asking the opinions and thoughts of, the student government’s Melissa Perez, as well as Colin Coulter.
As a student at East High School, the disrespect to the environment is disgusting and disheartening. The problem starts with students, and students need to take initiative to keep East High School clean. Some of the things I see outside in the parking lot are, food garbage, “The Lego Movie” double feature disc packaging, Fry’d cart package, a broken chair, and that was just one day. This is bad for East because it furthers a bad reputation on the school, and it hurts the environment.
“I think they treat the environment like children…it has an effect on our psychology to go to a school with messes on the front and in the halls…Theres no mirrors on the walls, there’s graffiti on the stalls… It’s to be expected, but by the time they graduate I’d like them to be more thoughtful,” teacher Colin Coulter said.
“The janitors have more, and better, things to do,” Coulter said. Coulter then gave a theoretical situation, “Someone dumps a bag of trash on your lawn, are you going to leave the bag of trash there or are you going to go out and pick it up? You can say, ‘I didn’t do it,’ but none of these stop the bag of trash from being in your yard,” he said.
“I don’t think that we are going to teach the students who litter not to litter but we teach the students who care to put in the extra effort to pick up after the students who litter…I live on the East side too, I went to East, I’ve lived on the East side my whole life… what I see here at East makes me sad for my home…It has to come from the students… even if we got a club that cleans up the school 15 minutes after school… we go home 50 minutes later but, the janitors have five hours less of work to do,” Coulter suggested.
Melissa Perez a member of student government, was asked how the environment has affected her as well as student government’s plans to help with the issue, as well as what she would like to say to the students who litter,
“Environment not just affects me but everyone else who’s in this building, teachers, students, janitors… We spend so much of our time in this building only for students to trash it,” Perez said.
Perez has a message to students who litter the school, “Please grow up, you’re in high school and should know way better. Students litter when there’s literally a trash can 3ft away from them only making our janitors jobs harder…This is something I feel very strongly about because when kids do this it’s so childish and disgusting,” Perez said.
The student government has made strives to show the students their poor actions, “We also make posts on our Instagram story here and there to stop trashing the school,” Perez said. Student government has taken actions in the past to try to fix the littering problem, “Student government has took on a project last year to help keep east clean. We wanted to decorate trash cans and put more around the school. We sent posters to classrooms for students to color and hang up around the school as well. However, immature kids also decided to rip these off the walls and throw them on the floors,” Perez said.
The problem starts with students. Students need to be the one who pick up after themselves because they will not always have someone to clean up their messes. East High School is stuck in an endless cycle of garbage and if nothing changes East will continue to be trashed.