Caden Christopher (left) and Corbin Delacruz felt a sense of true accomplishment after impulsively deciding to clean up the football stadium bleachers on a recent Saturday afternoon. Panther Press photo
By Malu Monrreal
Panther Press
It was a pleasant September Saturday and NRHEG eighth-graders Corbin Delacruz and Caden Christopher were passing the time together walking around town and talking. Deciding it might be fun to race each other on the high school track, they meandered over. As they entered the grounds, their eyes fell on the bleachers, where the crowd had cheered the Panthers through the exciting rivalry against Janesville for the “golden brick” the evening before.
With the Friday Night Lights no longer beaming though, the full sunlight of a Saturday afternoon left room for only one impression: “It was a huge mess,” says Corbin. Scattered on the seats, the floor, and the ground underneath were candy wrappers, drink containers, popcorn bags, and flyers. “I looked at Caden and I said, ‘It’s dirty. We should totally clean it up.’”
Caden agreed. “It looked awful,” he says. “And clearing away all that trash seemed like a good thing to do.” The two boys got to work. Corbin called his mother, NRHEG Family and Consumer Sciences teacher Kelly Delacruz, and asked her to bring over some trash bags. Then the boys spent the next four hours collecting trash from both the north and south sets of bleachers.
“I went along the top,” says Caden. “When I came to a bottle or a can, I would throw it down lower.”
“We kind of made a game out of it,” says Corbin. “Caden would throw things down to me and I would run back and forth picking them up.” Between them, the boys filled three trash bags.
As they finished, the two looked at the much cleaner bleachers with a sense of pride. “I felt relieved,” says Corbin, “and happy because we did something that needed to be done—and that no one had asked us to do.
“Everything looked a lot nicer than it did when we got there.”
Richard Stenzel, head custodian at the secondary school, says that he and his staff were impressed—and surprised—when they learned that students had used their Saturday afternoon in such a generous way. Typically, trash in the bleachers is picked up sometime early the following week, but the task is nearly always complicated by weather or the demands of other work. “Sometimes it’s pretty hard to get out there and take care of it,” says Stenzel. “It was especially nice of them to use their time on a weekend, when they could have been doing something else.”