Following a two-minute warning from their principal, students in the second- and fourth-grade lunch period at Myron J. Francis Elementary School quickly jumped up and got to work.

And although they weren’t being graded on anything, they nonetheless performed their task with quick and learned precision. Some students dumped their milk into a liquids-only bin, others scraped food scraps into one marked “compost”, and some placed unopened items into a cooler bag that would become available to one of their fellow students to enjoy at a later time.

It was a snapshot into what has now become a simple and happily-embraced part of the school lunch routine, and what proponents of a statewide recycling and composting organization hope will become widespread throughout the district in the months and years to come.

“For the kids it’s natural,” said Ryan Queenan, Ward 1 representative of the East Providence School Committee who had pushed for the better part of two years to get the Rhode Island School Recycling Project (RISRP) into East Providence. “This is not a change for them. It makes a lot of sense to them. They’re like ‘Yeah, we should be recycling. Composting makes a lot of sense, that’s really cool.’ It’s not a hard sell. The student buy-in, from what I gather, has been absolutely huge.”

Back in November of 2025, the RISRP appeared before the school committee to give the pitch they’ve delivered around the state — for East Providence to join the dozens of schools already participating in the program; one that would reduce the amount of trash a school produces, save excessive waste from going to the landfill, and increase awareness of recycling and composting among young people. 

Better yet, the program would be totally free for the first year, and possibly be a financial net-positive in the long run due to low costs and likely savings on waste removal.

Myron J. Francis was ultimately chosen to be the pilot school for the program in East Providence. According to principal Jamie McKenzie, they started the rollout the first week of March; delayed a week by the historic blizzard. 

Personnel from RISRP come to train school personnel and students on how the program works, and then the school was off and running.

"It's a very easy lift once you initially get things going. It's been very well received,” McKenzie said. “There are kids in the community that already do it at home with their family. So that's been nice too.”

When the RISRP came to the school committee last year, they brought numbers indicating that East Providence wastes an estimated 92 tons of food each year throughout all district schools combined; with over half (57.2 tons) of that coming just from elementary schools.

Of those 92 tons of food waste, they said, over 20 tons is “perfectly good” food, including unopened yogurts, whole fruits and vegetables, and unopened milks, among other items. This all occurs while 38 percent of Rhode Islanders face food insecurity, and East Providence specifically having the highest number of people utilizing SNAP in the East Bay.

While it’s too early to tell if the program is drastically reducing the waste at Myron J. Francis, everyone at a celebratory event held on Friday, May 15 showcasing the program’s successful implementation at the school said the process was intuitive, simple, and well-received.

Rep. Jennifer Boylan (D-Dist. 66, Barrington, East Providence) has been a proponent of composting and recycling for many years. She said Primrose Elementary School in Barrington had a similar program when her own child, now 23, was a student there. 

She said in addition to the benefits of teaching kids about being more environmentally responsible, it provides a practical and financial benefit to municipalities and to the state as well.

“It needs to be in every district…It is a win-win-win,” she said. “It’s fiscally responsible, and saving municipalities money. When our landfill is full and we’re stuck doing what Connecticut is doing — they’re spending north of $90 million a year to get their garbage shipped out of state…That’s taxpayer dollars to ship trash away.”

Queenan said that it remained his goal to see the program expand in the district.

“My strategy is to have the program continue to grow in our elementary schools and then grow into our middle school and then into the high school,” he said. “And if that can all happen sooner, that’s great. But if it’s a step-by-step process, the kids in fifth grade right now will go into middle school having already done it, and they’ll be like, ‘Why are we not doing it here?’”