In the spring of 2025, Seven Generations Ahead (SGA), through the PlanItGreen initiative, partnered with Less is More, a sustainability consulting firm, to conduct waste assessments at every District 97 elementary school in Oak Park. Among the important findings: six of the 10 schools in District 97 have dishwashers, but single-use plastics and compostable trays are still being used in most schools. It turned out only two were actually operational when the assessment was conducted.
Most of these dishwashers have not been used in years, which begs the question: Why? Do they need repairs or to be replaced? For most schools, this question remains unanswered and has yet to be explored or prioritized. But the students and parents at Beye Elementary were determined to get to the bottom of it and fix it.
The dishwasher in Beye was last used pre-pandemic, when the school was using reusable silverware and reusable trays in the lunchroom. Once students returned to school, the hot lunch program was suspended and, due to health and safety concerns, single-use items were reintroduced. Once hot lunch resumed in April 2022, it was determined that the dishwasher was not working and that single-use plastics and compostable trays would be used for the remainder of the year. The hope and expectation was that it would be fixed for the following school year.
During the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, the Beye Student Green Team actively advocated for the dishwasher to be fixed or replaced. Beye PTO Green Team parent volunteers Lauren Smith-MacGregor and Kara Finnegan held a monthly Plastic Free Wednesday to bring attention to the issue. They would swap out the plastic sporks and offer silverware for the day, then take it home and wash it in their own homes. They wanted to raise awareness of the fact that Beye still had silverware at the school, but because it wasn’t being used, an enormous number of sporks were ending up in the landfill each day.
This wasteful practice wasn’t aligning with Beye’s history, reputation, and practices of being a “green” school. In 2011, Beye won the Environmental Hero Award from Governor Pat Quinn, and in 2012, the Fitzsimmons Award for Excellence in Public Health. In 2022, Beye won the Illinois Green School Award.
The students wondered why their “green” school was using single-use plastics everyday instead of silverware, and that’s what led them to discover that the dishwasher was broken.
The Student and PTO Green Team requests to have the dishwasher repaired went unanswered for years. Was it a faulty $5 part? Was it a plumbing issue? Did it need to be replaced? By the fall of 2024, they still had no answers and there was no plan or urgency to act.
The Student Green Team decided to make it their mission to raise awareness about the need to start using reusable silverware again in the lunchroom. After collecting and counting all the sporks at lunch one day, they learned that nearly 150 sporks ended up in the landfill. They averaged that across the year and then across the other schools to understand the true impact of single-use plastics in the district.
The Student Green Team made and signed petitions throughout the school, hung up posters, and talked to the principal. Finally, they decided to make a movie about their quest to stop using single-use plastics and submitted it to the One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest. The Beye Student Green Team’s entry was one of nearly 400 submissions from 58 countries. The film, entitled “The Dishwasher Quest,” was ranked among the top 10 best short films in the contest and, as a winner, they took home a $500 environmental activism award from the Jane Goodall Institute. The winning films will be screened in Chicago in September at an awards celebration.
Meanwhile, back in December, 2023 the district had passed a Sustainability Policy, but its implementation has not been prioritized. In 2025, a District 97 Sustainability Task Force was formed in order to help implement the policy and create standard operating procedures throughout the district.
The task force is composed of parents, including members of the Beye PTO Green Team, teachers, community members, school board members, and District 97 administration. The issue of the dishwasher was brought up at these meetings.
Simultaneously, SGA helped form the Cross Agency Sustainability Exchange (CASE), composed of representatives from District 97, Oak Park River Forest High School District 200, and the Village of Oak Park to help implement sustainability measures throughout these three entities. Smith-MacGregor and Finnegan also serve as members of the CASE “Waste and Food” subgroup. The issue of single-use plastics being used daily in most of the schools, despite having access to dishwashers, has been discussed in these meetings as well. SGA’s Zero Waste Schools (ZWS) program has helped guide this subgroup on waste reduction best practices that can be standardized across agencies, with an emphasis on reducing single-use plastics.
Fortunately, after three years of advocacy from more than 100 Student Green Team members and Beye parents, a new dishwasher was eventually ordered and delivered to Beye, and has now officially been installed. The Beye Student and PTO Green Team’s persistence and advocacy has finally paid off. Their success, and the close collaboration made possible through CASE and other local initiatives, paves the way for more District 97 elementary schools to go green and ditch disposables.
