LUNCH TRAYS by the numbers

120,000

Lunches served daily at 227 Dallas ISD schools

20.5 million

Rectangular polystyrene trays used and thrown away, annually

4 cents

Cost of a typical polystyrene tray

12 cents

Cost of the tray’s compostable counterpart

2.5 million

Meals the Alliance school districts serve daily

225 million

5 cents

Cost of new, innovative compostable plates, thanks to the collective purchasing power of the Urban School Food Alliance, a coalition of Dallas ISD and some the largest school districts in the United States including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, MiamiDade and Orlando

Number of polystyrene trays projected to be removed from landfills annually.

“The only reason that school districts and others haven’t used recyclable products is cost, so by bringing together these six major districts in the country, the volume of buying power was able to push the price of recyclables down to polystyrene,” says Margaret Lopez, Dallas ISD director of nutrition. “In the future, hopefully they will be available to smaller districts as well.”

Source: Dallas ISD food and child nutrition services

Thomas C. Marsh Preparatory Academy

A ‘one size fits one’ approach

If you were looking for the traditional students-in-desks, teacher-giving-lecture set-up, you wouldn’t have found it in Marsh English teacher Isaac Freeman’s classroom last year, says principal Nicky Niewinski.

“When you walked into his classroom, you really didn’t know where he was because kids were doing di erent things on computers, or on the floor working on a collaborative project,” she says.

That’s the beauty of personalized learning, an education strategy Marsh will launch this year with its incoming sixthgraders. Her team was one of 36 chosen by the district in its initial call for choice school applications, which eventually were winnowed down to just six schools. As part of its selection, Marsh is receiving its share of the $2.6 million Gates Foundation grants, doled out to the Dallas ISD campuses on top of their general budgets.

Marsh piloted the program last year with a few teachers, who converted their classrooms into “station rotations,” Niewinski says. Freeman, for example, created a menu list of learning items each student needed to complete, and students could make choices about what activities they did, books they read, research, etc. He would check in with them along the way to make sure they would finish final projects on time.

It makes the learning process “highly interactive” and the students self-motivated, Niewinski says. Freeman called it “own your learning,” and when she walked into classrooms and questioned the students, that’s exactly what she found.

“The kids were able to explain it to you in a much deeper way than they had before,” Niewinski says. “Whereas when you have a teacher in front of the room talking to a class of 30, you may or may not get that from an individual student because not everyone is able to keep pace with the teacher.”

Lisa Smith, who has a incoming Marsh sixth-grader, says she lauded this to another family trying to decide between Marsh and private school for their child, who struggles with learning di erences.

“This is going to make it so that every kid who learns di erently — and we all know every kid learns di erently — your kid who used to be singled out isn’t going to look different anymore,” Smith says.

Smith also is the talented and gifted teacher at Dallas ISD’s Foster Elementary. Elementary parents are always nervous about middle school, she says, and the prospect of a “personalized learning” campus may create one more unknown. She emphasizes, however, that “these kids aren’t guinea pigs,” participating in an untested methodology.

“The entire education system in the country and in Dallas is changing,” Smith says. “When you think about the world we live in, there aren’t many workplaces anymore that everybody gets the same thing to do.”

With Marsh’s new personalized learning approach, she says, “It won’t be the entire classroom sitting in desks, staring at a teacher.”

She also appreciates that Niewinski breaks down each space on campus, as- signing certain floors and even stairwells to certain grades. “She doesn’t, I think, do that so much for the kids as she does for the parents,” Smith says.

Middle school is “such a volatile time,” she says. “You don’t have the control you did when they are little, and they don’t want you involved as much. Parents just don’t really necessarily know their own kid anymore because from minute to minute, they’re di erent people.”

Niewinski recognizes this, too.

“I feel like middle school is kind of the missing link for us in education,” she says. Schools tend to focus on graduating students, “which is important,” she says,