By Roberto Kampfner
Business Manager
Mira Costa science teachers offered extra credit for attending the Manhattan Beach Middle School Green Team’s screening on March 10 of the documentary “A Plastic Ocean” which showed the amount of plastic and pollution in our oceans today.
The Green Team club, with the help of club leader and science teacher Tanya Sanchez, put on the event to increase membership and spread awareness of the larger environmental issues facing our world today.
“Our club is really small, and we’re figuring out ways to get our name out there,” Sanchez said. “I get a lot of different emails about opportunities for students or teacher activities, and one came through about this new documentary and we ran with it.”
Click here for the trailer to “A Plastic Ocean”
According to Sanchez, the screening was also an effort to incentivize action to clean up the community. MBMS has recently devised a system that grades students based on cleaning up trash around school. The days are graded as red, yellow, or green based on how the students perform.
“It’s something that is near and dear to me,” Sanchez said. “Plus, I know how many kids love going to the beach and swimming in the ocean here and I asked them if they would try a movie night and see what happens.”
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The Green Team started raising money earlier this year by asking for donations from students and parents and pre selling tickets. According to Sanchez, the addition of the high school demographic increased attendance by roughly 100 people and increased donation money too.
“Once we got the high school teachers to give extra credit we got a big push for the tickets and the sales increased,”Sanchez said. “The more people that come the better,”
Click here for a review of “A Plastic Ocean”
Some science teachers at Mira Costa had offered extra credit for attending the screening of “A Plastic Ocean” because the subjects being discussed are important to our lives, according to Yoon Hearn, and AP Biology teacher at Mira Costa.
“I know people have plans and are busy, but we just thought it was for a great cause,” Hearn said. “For the Middle School to be so proactive about recycling and being green is an amazing opportunity.”
According to Hearn, the topic of the film is parallel to Biology and other science classes, and it has to do with our community and the organisms around us so the more people that are aware the better.
“It’s our community,” Hearn said. “It’s where we live, right by the beach and it is going to affect us. This is a way to support the Middle School and we want to expose as many people as we can.”
According to Mrs. Sanchez, the students from the high school made up most of the crowd, but the students from the MBMS had a more genuine interest. The students who built the project and raised the money got to see their work pay off.
“The kids were on board with my idea to try a movie night,” Sanchez said. “I require them to do extra work outside the classroom as a sort of fun homework, and they some of the people here are fulfilling that requirement by being here. The turnout is more than we could have hoped for.”
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