By Owen Wharton & Jason Andrew
January 21, 2025
Students are leaving behind large amounts of trash at Carver HSES in places like the cafeteria, commons, and courtyard causing staff to begin threatening detentions. In the beginning and even now, as Carver students head into the middle of the school year, some blatantly do not throw away their trash, which is a problem because it can lead to health problems and unwanted visitors. Ms Pat, a support staff member at Carver, notes that rats and cockroaches would come from the trash.
“They would drop it on the ground, wouldn't pick it up. We got numerous trash cans outside, and it brings the rats and the roaches.”
According to the environment and health data portal on nyc.gov, rats and roaches can “damage property, degrade housing, contaminate food, and transmit diseases.” In addition, they can worsen active health problems, like asthma. They say “Pests can trigger asthma and other health issues.”
Even just the trash itself such as old food can breed pathogens and even possibly contaminate surrounding water supplies for the school via runoff as stated by PubMed Central. Not only that but also the soil can be contaminated which could also get children sick if they were to be too exposed to it as found by sciencedirect.
The staff have tried to be reasonable about this situation by talking to students but seeing as the problem remains detentions are now on the table to handle the situation. If I identify them, then I'm going to give them a detention, because we've talked to them. The principals talk to them. Everyone has talked to all the students, about leaving the trash. -Ms Pat commented.
Sophomore Curtis Kelly had some comments about having the lunch after everyone and how the trash is most commonly seen during that lunch. I mean I have sixth lunch, the last lunch so people leave the trash out the most.
There is also discussion about potentially creating a recycling program to help people leave less trash around the school when asked about what she would like to see, ms pat gave a few things she would like to see in this recycling program.
“They schedule the trash pickup, make sure they pick it up and put it where there's a it's supposed to be. And maybe get some rewards. If we recycle, you know, so much of it, someone will give us a reward for the club.“ Ms Pat said.
When asked for the students’ opinions, there were varied responses, student Marvelous Win added that people would not want to clean up their trash and would just leave it out on the tables. Win said that; “A lot of people just leave their lunches on the lunch table.”
Ms Pat expressed some concern about the fairness of the fact that some students were not getting a clean place for the students to eat.
"This is somewhere all of us come and we try to eat lunch, right? And it's not fair for them to leave trash and let it be dirty for the next group that comes. So we all need to help each other keep our areas clean."
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