Written by Audrey Sochor
The students and employees of the Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA) hope to have a new feature added to the playground soon and are looking to the community for support. The organization is holding a bottle cap drive for a buddy bench.
Introduced to America in 2013 by an elementary school student, buddy benches are a simple way to eliminate loneliness and foster friendship on the playground. Children who are lonely at the time can sit on the bench, which lets the other kids know they are looking for someone to play with.
The idea to bring one to RESA started when Jean Sturtridge, director of legal services, was talking to a friend who works at an elementary school in Adrian. Like her friend, Strutridge decided to take it a step farther – collecting bottle caps to be recycled and made into the bench.
“Certainly the RESA community has gotten involved. We have people who have children and grandchildren who are collecting Ziploc bags of caps,” Strutridge said.
Currently, the organization has about 90 pounds of bottle caps, which they started collecting in the fall of 2017. It takes 400 pounds for one bench.
Strutridge added cap donations are appreciated. They will accept any color of hard plastic cap like those found on pop and water bottles, gallons of milk or orange juice jugs.
RESA is all about education so Strutridge and some teachers have also taken the chance to turn this project into a learning experience.
Special needs students at the Woodland Development Center wash all the donated bottle caps and send them to the transition students at the Virtual Learning Academy. Those students, who are between 18 and 26 years old and learning pre-employment skills, then weigh and sort the caps – jobs found in plants and workshops.
“They’re doing math figures with them, calculations with them, so they’re doing all those pre-employment skills that kind of support that,” said Deana Tuczek, director of special education. “So not are we only getting the outcome of the buddy benches, we’re also having our students learn from that process.”
The first bench will be gifted back to Woodland due to the students’ involvement, but Strutridge and Tuczek hope to get enough bottle caps for more benches so elementary schools around the county can have one.
“I think this is a great opportunity for our student to be able to support their other students in the building,” Tuczek said. “Those that are struggling with making friends or having someone that they are going to play with when they go on the playground. We all know that those social interactions are the base of why many of our kids come to school, so it’s nice to see they have that opportunity to be a friend to someone else.”
People can drop off bottle caps to the Woodland Developmental Center, the Transitions program in the RESA TEC building or to Jean Sturtridge at the RESA admin building.
