Brorson School Wins The Smart Schools Challenge

This year Brorson School participated in Montana Saving Money and Resources Today (SMART) Schools challenge. The SMART schools challenge is for K-12 schools all across the state of Montana and supported by the Lieutenant Governor's Office, U.S. Green Building Council, and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. There are three sub-challenges that schools can participate in; Energy Challenge, Recycling Challenge, and Green Schools Challenge. At the end of the challenge four schools from each of the three sub-challenges are chosen as winners. These become the twelve champion schools who receive a $1,000 check and state wide recognition from the Lieutenant Governor. The challenge is run from October through March, awards being given in April.

Brorson decided to take on the recycling challenge and recycle as much material as we could. We are a small school with only five students enrolled. The outcome of our challenge took the entire community by surprise. In just six months our students were able to recycle 3,173 pounds of newspaper/magazines, cardboard, plastic, and aluminum. This broke down to each student recycling about 635 pounds!! We could not have done it without the support of our community. Richland Inn and Suites and Stockman Bank donated the newspapers they received every month to our challenge. Other community members would stop by the school with bags of material for us to take in and donate. Our biggest supporter was Richland Opportunities Inc. (ROI), where we took all the recyclables each month to be weighed and sorted. They would see us pull into the parking lot and meet us in the garage where they took in all material, helped us unload the car, weighed each bin, and separated the material.

All of the hard work paid off in April when we received a call from the SMART Schools coordinator, Callye Foster. We were one of 14 schools that won the SMART Schools Challenge this year! Callye came out and visited our school, bringing us a banner, certificate and the much appreciated $1,000 check. We plan on spending the money on new P.E. equipment for the students, new and larger recycling bins, and an outdoor recycling station for the community to drop off materials even when school is out of session. We loved participating in the program so much that we plan on participating again next year and expanding what we did. We will participate in both the Recycling Challenge and in the Green Schools Challenge. If you would like to be a part of this adventure, you can drop off newspapers, magazines, cardboard, plastic and aluminum at the school. We are located seven miles outside of Sidney, towards Culbertson at 12917 County Road 344 Sidney, MT.