Spotlight on Special Education

Maywood students get "green" and give back

Students in the Maywood School’s Comprehensive Developmental Skills (CDS) classes of teachers Alan Clarke, Deborah Goetz and Dorothy Pesnel have come up with a crafty and heart-warming answer to the environmental question of what to do with used plastic grocery bags.

Since last fall, students have been making a comforter-sized “bag bed”, an eco-friendly project speech pathologist Lori Sinisgalli introduced as a way of boosting students’ communication and social skills and enhancing a recycling unit started by Goetz.

Twice a week, the classes meet to create chains of bags that are then woven together. Sinisgalli estimates that when the bed is complete, almost 1,000 used bags will have been repurposed.

“Thanks to the students’ hard work, a lot fewer bags that will end up harming the environment,” says Sinisgalli.

As part of the project, teachers and students have also studied the topic of homelessness. Ultimately, they plan to donate the warm and fluffy bedding to a local shelter in the hope of comforting someone in need.

By helping others, Sinisgalli reports, the class is also helping themselves. As they work toward this common goal, the middle and high schoolers have become more social, made new friends and are practicing important math skills such as estimating, predicting and sequencing, along with citizenship and environmentalism.

“It is really sweet to see how invested in this project everyone has become,” says Sinisgalli, who adds that the students, other teachers and their families are now bringing bags from home for the project.

“I loved the idea but, honestly, was not sure how well it might work. It has been great,” says Sinisgalli, “and we all have gotten so much out of it.”