Hayes Green Team 


Michigan Green School since 2016. Evergreen School since 2019 (highest distinction)

Awards:  


For Daily Art Room/Green Team Enrichment Tweets follow @CMLakatos

https://twitter.com/cmlakatos

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:  We regret to inform you that we are unable to move forward with our pollinator garden plans at this time. Due to LMC renovations beginning in April, our proposed garden site will be fenced off and we will temporarily lose our water source as well.


Stay tuned for further information regarding our new garden installation date NEXT YEAR. We appreciate everyone who took the time to offer their assistance.

Your Green Team


NEW! Hayes has joined the Staples Writing Tools Recycling Program! We are accepting old mechanical pencils, pens, dried out markers, highlighters, Sharpies; any writing tool made of plastic, caps included! Please place these in the round, blue collection bin located in the art room.                                                                                                                                                                                   

Have you ever visited Corrado Park in our Hayes neighborhood? https://www.cityofwestland.com/facilities/facility/details/Samuel-J-Corrado-Park-23

If so, you have probably noticed the 3 Bs Bird, Butterfly and Bee Native Plant Garden tucked in the southeast corner. Our Green Team has enjoyed a unique partnership with the garden and it's founder Joanne Schwab. We visit the park annually to learn about the garden, enjoy a picnic lunch and pick strawberries. Joanne has visited our school to talk about native plants, the importance of pollinators, and students participated in releasing monarch butterflies with her. She invited our students to design signs to identify the plants and bird, butterfly or bee that it attracts. She even purchased a time capsule for the Hayes class of 2030. After burying it by the garden, Joann had a special plaque made to identify it. As a thank you for all that Joann has done for us, the Hayes Green Team donated a green plastic bottle bench for visitors to rest while enjoying the garden. While visiting the garden, see if you can find the green plastic bottle cap bench, plant identification signs made by former Hayes students, and a plaque identifying the Class of 2030 time capsule. 


Please mark your calendar for the 3Bs Community Appreciation Day. See image below.


A big THANK YOU to the Hayes PTA for funding our ANIMAL MAGIC assembly on Wednesday April 3rd and to all the families that attended Wednesday evening. Everyone seemed to enjoy the performance!

For more information, reach out to Mark at  https://iwantanimalmagic.com/

See images below.


What is the Green Team? Everyone at Hayes is part of the Green Team! We all work together to make our school and our community more sustainable. We collaborate to find and implement solutions to reduce waste and to increase recycling through advocacy and action.

Mission Statement:  

Developing the next generation of environmental leaders through education, project-based learning, and community service.

Beliefs:

Students must be engaged at the intersection of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM), energy, environment and public health to develop sustainable solutions, employability, college and career readiness knowledge, and skills. 

Sustainability:  Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. 

At Hayes we are focused on making small changes that we can make to help look after our planet. Making these changes helps protect animals, plants and our natural resources so that our children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy them. 

The 5 R's 

As a designated Michigan Green School, we encourage our students, staff and the entire Hayes community to take part in our initiative to help save resources and reduce pollution. Last year, we introduced more recycling into our school. Our goal this year is to expand on that. Rather than simply deferring waste from one resource to another, we practice the 5 Rs: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose – with Recycle as the final option, not the first. As with other habits, incorporating this mindset into our everyday lives takes practice, but with a little awareness, it won’t be long before it becomes part of our daily routines. Learning about the 5 R's in school means that our students are more likely to adopt it as a habit, helping to create conscientious adults. 

WHAT DOES HAYES RECYCLE? 

Paper-Each classroom has a paper recycling bin. These are emptied into the Abitibi Paper Retriever container located in our west parking lot. Our school receives $$$ for the paper we collect. The community is encouraged to utilize this bin as well! Please help us spread the word that this bin is for PAPER ONLY. PLEASE, NO cardboard, magazines, or trash!


Plastic-Students are encouraged to bring reusable water bottles to school each day to cut down on plastic use. All plastics placed in the large blue bins provided by the City of Westland must meet be clean and contain the proper identification code. Look for the triangle with a number in the center (usually located on the bottom). The City of Westland Recycling accepts plastics #1, 2, 4, 5 & 7. Please do not place plastic grocery bags in these bins as they damage the equipment. These bins also accept paper, cardboard and metal.


Plastic Film Recycling- This is a great way to recycle all those plastic bags that accumulate in your household. Students and staff are encouraged to collect acceptable stretchy plastics and place in the proper bins. The Green Team will collect and deposit them at various locations in the community at the end of each month. 


NEW THIS YEAR! Staples and Terracycle has partnered together and are recycling writing utensils. We will be collecting all brands of pens and pen caps, mechanical pencils, markers and marker caps, highlighters and highlighter caps, permanent markers and permanent marker caps. Start collecting now and send in with your child. 

HAYES DOES IT AGAIN! We placed 2nd place in the Detroit Zoo GreenPrize for our Waste Free Wednesday Campaign. We were awarded $500 for our Green Team and have been invited to attend an awards ceremony at the Detroit Zoo on April 20, 2024 from 9am-3pm. Since we had a limit of 30 tickets, we offered them to interested fourth graders. They will be able to attend the zoo's GreenFest, a celebration of sustainability and environmental stewardship and will include the following:

https://detroitzoo.org/events/zoo-events/greenfest/

Ms. Lakatos and Ms. Kish will see you at the zoo!

Our goal for the 2023-24 school year was to reduce the amount of trash that we produce during our school day. Starting last December, we asked all of our Hayes Huskies to pack a waste free lunch and/or snack every Wednesday. 

WHAT IS WASTE FREE? A waste-free lunch contains no throwaway packaging. Food and drinks are packed in reusable containers within a reusable lunch bag or box. All containers are resealable so that any leftover food and drink can be consumed (or composted) later.

Our Green Team performed monthly waste audits to determine how many students were bringing a waste free lunch and/or snack. Here are our results:  We discovered that the majority of food that is being thrown away is uneaten, or unopened packages of food. One bag of garbage collected at the end of one lunch period weighed in at 10 pounds of uneaten food!

Photos above: 2022-23 Fourth graders buried a time capsule at the 3B's Native Plant Garden at Corrado Park to be opened upon their graduation. Seeing a need for a bench at the garden, they raised funds to purchase one made entirely out of plastic bottle caps. Check it out the next time you visit the garden. Sit, breathe and relax!

NexTrex Plastic Film School Recycling Challenge  https://nextrex.com/view/educate

The nationwide competition hosted by the Trex Company, the world's largest manufacturer of composite decking and railing challenged K-12 students from across the country in 2022 to collect and recycle as much polyethylene (PE) plastic film as possible over a five-month period between America Recycles Day (November 15) and Earth Day (April 22) for the chance to win cash prizes and high-performance Trex outdoor living products for their schools.

Hayes students collected over 200 lbs. of plastic film during this time period! 


SPIRIT DAY 2024:  A BIG THANK YOU for your generous donations on our Dress Like a Pollinator School SPIRIT DAY! We raised enough money to symbolically adopt a Monarch butterfly from the World Wildlife Fund www.worldwildlife.org 

A huge thank you to the LPS Foundation for the generous check which will be used to create a Native Plant Pollinator garden at Hayes. We will need lots of help from the Hayes community to make this dream a reality. Stay tuned!!!