Pitching in

OTHELLO — J. J. Ozuma was amazed at what he and some classmates found cleaning up a long stretch of McManamon Road.

“There’s a lot of drunkenness in Othello,” the Desert Oasis High School junior said. “One of the biggest things we found out there were alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, plastic bags, McDonald’s waste containers.”

“It’s weird,” Ozuma continued. “You go around in town and you don’t see it, you don’t see beer cans everywhere.”

But when you go north from Othello toward the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, Ozuma said it changes.

“Whatever beer can you could think of, it was out there,” he said.

Ozuma wasn’t just working off a fuzzy memory. He, along with over 80 other Desert Oasis High School students, spent several months earlier this spring not only cleaning up a 16-mile stretch of McManamon Road but collecting data on everything they picked up.

“Citizenship is a big focus at Desert Oasis High School,” explained Principal Russell Kovalenko. “When we created this project, just cleaning up the road would not have done it.”

Everything students do at Desert Oasis is intended to further their educations, Kovalenko said. So,the school’s 85 students didn’t just go out in teams to pick up trash, they took clipboards and kept track of everything they found so they could analyze the data.

“We wanted to present the findings to the city council,” Kovalenko said.

Which Ozuma, along with fellow student Cesar Ponce, did earlier this month, suggesting that the city install recycling bins for glass, plastic and paper, and even partner with local businesses to give motorists small trash bags for their cars.

“In Texas, if you get pulled over and you don’t have one of those, you could get a ticket,” Ozuma explained.

Ozuma also thought it was time that Othello embrace recycling — at least install public containers — the way the West Side and Spokane have.

“It’s kind of strange we don’t have it here,” Ozuma said. “We’re basically dead middle (in the state); how come we haven’t accepted this?”

Ozuma said the Othello Police Department is actually interested in the auto trash bags idea, and is talking about spending a little money — about $1,000 — and finding some sponsors to help defray the costs or make more car trash containers available.

The students themselves came up with the solutions, according to Adam Shockey, who teaches history and government at Desert Oasis High School as well as international relations at Eastern Washington State University.

“We wanted this to be student-led,” Shockey said. “We didn’t want to co-opt them. We wanted to start the conversation, getting solutions into people’s minds.”

And Shockey was convinced that the students at Desert Oasis High School were going to have a positive effect on the community.

“Stick around Othello long enough, and you’re going to see people using these solutions,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.