Composting Class Teaches Better Conservation

By Anna Scheglov and Peter Blanchard

It’s almost time for the “Compost with Confidence” workshops to end. The Cornell Cooperative Extension has held these classes every last Saturday for the past three months and aims to inform local residents about a growing sustainable environmental practice known as composting.

This workshop series, ending in October, focuses mostly on indoor composting methods more ideal for people living in an urban environment. In particular, this session focused on what balance to use in compost and what people can do in order to continue composting throughout winter.

The CCE offers a training program to those wishing to become ‘master composters’ and so furthers the reach of the Tompkins County Solid Waste Management Division in its efforts to reduce the amount of compostable materials going into landfills. Nancy Arif became a master composter when she recently finished her training.

“There all kinds of classes going on at CCE throughout the winter,” Arif said. “It is a really great, free source to keep our gardens healthy and vibrant, but we’re also not sending things into the landfill.”

Thomas Shelley has volunteered with the Master Composters for the past three years. He thinks that composting is very important, and says the organization often works to bring it to the attention of children.

“Almost every school now has some sort of composting setup,” Shelley said. “They all have little gardens, and they have worm bins, and they have the usual outdoor kind of stuff that kids can do with plants and compost.”

Shelley explains what he calls the simple science of composting.

“When you take something like food scraps that have a lot of nitrogen in them, and mix them with something like dried leaves or straws which have a lot of carbon, naturally occurring organisms will then populate that pile, and will decompose the food scraps and the browns. There are several thousand species in the average compost bin.”

Shelley says it is all these species combined with everything in the compost pile that cause the pile to decompose.

The worm bin technique demonstrated on Saturday is used for indoor composting, which requires warmer temperatures and more attention than an outdoor pile.

Although Shelley appreciates that the artificial environment created by the bin makes growing things very effective indoors, especially during Ithaca’s cold winters, he says indoor growing only works with smaller quantities. “You can do a couple pounds a week in the average worm bin.”

Ava Ryan is a junior, sustainable agriculture major at Cornell University who took the composting training last spring. Ryan feels that composting is extremely important for everyone, both for economical and ecological reasons.

“You pay $15 and get a Styrofoam bin and your worms, and that’s basically everything you need to set up your own home worm bin,” Ryan said.  “You add your food scraps to the worm bin, they eat it and decompose it, and you have compost. It’s just good for the environment.”

Although composting can be done either inside or outside, it requires the temperature to remain between 50-75 degrees. When colder, growing necessitates an indoor environment.

“We’re oriented more towards people in their households and making food scraps and composting the food scraps and things like that.” Shelley explained when speaking of the CCE’s shift towards winter.

The Compost Education Program will be holding their last workshop of the semester on the last Saturday of October, focusing on techniques to compost during the winter.

"Stealth" Composting class held this past Saturday.

Jungle Residents Strive for Freedom

By Anna Scheglov and Gabrielle Waldvogel

On September 15, 2011, the drafted eviction notice designed to uproot the inhabitants of the wooded area known as “The Jungle” was postponed. The eviction notice, although not issued directly to the residents, was met with fervent protests from those living on the site, as well as Ithaca community members.

Lorraine Tunnicliff, a resident of “The Jungle” for almost 30 years said she wished that the residents could be free to live as they please.  “We’re not hurting nothing down here, we’re not bothering nobody. It’s our home; it’s our second home. We just want to be left alone.”

“The Jungle” is located on a strip of land between the South Norfolk Railway and the Cayuga Inlet where homeless people established a year-round campsite, over 70 years ago.

“We don’t like to be inside all the time, 24 hrs a day, seven days a week. “ Tunnicliff explains, “It’s a place for us to go to have peace and quiet and just sit here and drink a cold beer.”

One of the resident sites at the Jungle

Fellow resident, Penny Shaffer, has lived in “The Jungle” for the better part of the past 15 years and says there are usually about four or five permanent residents, even through the coldest winters.

“We just like it outside, we just like to sit around with our friends and family that passed along down here. We want to be with them,” said Shaffer.

The Jungle, and those who inhabit it have a long history built upon a deep-rooted sense of community, loyalty and trust. “We trust being down in the jungle more than we do in the streets. You guys [in the city council] are worrying about us so much down here, why aren’t you guys worrying about the people that’s getting stabbed and shot?” Tunicliff demands.

Many people who are without permanent homes seek protection in the woods of the Jungle. Shaffer explains, “You go on the street and someone might pull a gun or knife on you nowadays. If there was any fighting amongst our families… Next morning we’re back to brother and sister again! Basically, that’s what we call it, sibling rivalry.”

Community members who know the true nature of the Jungle seek to help in any way they can. Eric Lovett, Ithacan resident since 1969, has actively volunteered at the Friendship Center for the past 5 years. He has always had a house, but visits the Jungle once a year and says he wishes he could do more. “I don’t think nobody should go homeless in Ithaca. I figure if I come here and eat and drink the coffee, I can work and scrub a floor and clean a bathroom.” A Friendship Center official, Aloja Airewele, was unable to comment at the time of this publication. “I won’t be able to talk about the Jungle, it is a very sore subject right now, and I am not going to discuss it,” said Airewele. The Ithaca police and the Ithaca fire department also refused to comment.

“If they’re friends, they’re like family to us. We try to stick together and help ot each other. We try to keep a close family. It’s the Jungle… it’s freedom,” said Tunnicliff. It appears The Jungle is a truly collective community, where the residents are not just neighbors, but family.

A Look into the Jungle…

Even Start’s End Affects Community

By Nicole Black and Anna Scheglov

After 18 years of servicing local low-income families, the Even Start program was shut down August 31 due to budget cuts.

The program helped about 40 families in Newfield, Groton, South Seneca and Candor counties every year, supporting parents trying to get their GEDs and giving their children a jump-start on education.

Even Start used family educators to work with each family on a personal level, explained program coordinator Ruth Katz.

“It’s a very intensive program,” said Katz. “Each family educator has about 10 families in their case folder at any given time.”

Ruth Katz packs up her Even Start office.

Even Start was undergoing significant changes when Katz became the coordinator in 2002. The newly enacted No Child Left Behind Act “gave a way to measure whether it was working, pre-testing and post-testing, really looking at data and seeing what was working,” Katz said.

Fourteen new performance indicators added structure to the program, and participants had to show an interest in participating in all aspects of the program. These conditions provided a strong basis for improvement.

When the program first started, only 34 percent of the children taking part were going to school at the building average attendance, or the amount necessary to build upon ideas and concepts from the classroom. Over eighteen years, Even Start has raised that percentage to 80.

Myrtle Howe, a participant of the program for the past three years, was working towards her GED, as well as giving her children and grandchildren a head start on their educations.

”It gives kids an extra boost for kindergarten,” said Howe. “My grandson has just turned three… he thought he was going to be able to go to school and we got down there and he was going to cry.”

Intensity and instruction, or how closely the educators worked with the family, were critical for success within the program, Katz explained.

The family educators provided support to the families they worked with, making weekly home visits and building personal bonds with both the parents and children. Katz says it is this relationship aspect that sets Even Start apart from other programs.

“There are certainly a lot of great programs in the area, but the home piece, nobody else did that… our educators were in each of the homes and we also had offices in each of the schools,” Katz said.

This closeness to the family was essential to the program because a significant component of what the program did is show parents how to work with their own kids.

“It helps you focus in, and it helps you become a better parent to your child, because they’re involved in your education and your child’s education,” said Howe.

Katz explained that this is especially important in low-income communities, where many families have had bad experiences with school, so the expectation to graduate may not be there.

“If we can give the parent the tools to work with their child, then we can make a change happen,” Katz said.

Even Start also helped children become more sociable, according to Katz. Howe echoed this sentiment, recalling how worried she was for her daughter, Alisha, to start school due to her shyness.

“I was really scared to death, I didn’t know what to do when she started kindergarten, and if Even Start wasn’t there to help me cope with her being so shy, I think she would be held back,” Howe said.

Myrtle Howe reads to her daughter, Alisha, from a book given to her by Even Start.

Many felt that the program helped the community, and the data showed marked progress for participants in the program, as the program’s fact sheet shows that 75 percent of adults who tested below the 9^th grade level in math or reading gained one or more grade levels, and 89 percent of adults who tested above the 9^th grade level obtained GEDs.

“There’s so much today in education about accountability– show us the data, show us you’re making progress, and this program was making progress,” said South Seneca Elementary School Principal Margarete Couture.

Couture used Even Start in her school to offer a preschool program three times a week, extended it to children outside of the program, and provided classrooms and other materials for the program’s use.

“We treated the whole thing like it was an extension of our educational program,” said Couture, estimating that the program has affected about 300 people in her school.

Even with the support of the community and the success of the program, there is still a significant lack of funding. Without the transportation and childcare provided by Even Start, many parents will not be able to pursue a GED.

“It really depressed me, really put me down and I was crying,” Howe said. “I didn’t even want to continue my GED. It really kind of broke my heart.”

This sense of loss was felt not only by participants, but also by educators.

“We had 33 families who were with us through the end of August… there were a lot of tears,” Katz said.

Couture said she hoped that money would come down through Obama’s Race to the Top program, but if funding fails to come through, she does not know who will fill the void.