On a weekday morning at New Harmony High School, a charter school in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood, world geography teacher Alicia Cooke took up her post in the cafeteria.
She stood next to three clearly marked bins: compost, trash, and recycling. To further reduce waste, there’s a basket where students can leave items they don’t want — a banana, a box of cereal or an unopened juice — for others to pick up.
The compost was topped with yesterday’s lunch — something involving tortilla chips. As students finished breakfast, they piled waffles on top.
“This is getting picked up tomorrow, which is good,” Cooke said, wearing a tree-printed apron. “‘Cause it is getting full and nasty.”
Cooke tracked students’ movements and tried to redirect them if they were headed toward the wrong bin. When she was too late, she fished items out with her hands. The plastic syrup containers proved tricky. The bottoms weren’t recyclable. The tops were, but only if they weren’t dirty.
School cafeterias in the U.S. produce a lot of food waste, in part because students are often required to take certain items from the lunch line that they end up throwing away, like milk, vegetables or fruit. One study found some kids toss more than half of what’s on their trays.
In response, some states have embraced composting to reduce the environmental impact.
The practice is rare in Louisiana, but New Harmony is one of the few exceptions. Students and staff have composted the school’s food waste for the past few years.
“The kids get it. It’s been more bottom up with the adults,” said Cooke, who is one of the school’s two self-proclaimed “sustainability tsarinas.”
It makes sense that New Harmony composts, since one of the charter school’s founding principles is to help its roughly 300 students live in harmony with the environment, teaching through the lens of coastal restoration and preservation.
“We live in a place that stands to benefit from composting,” Cooke said. “We really want our students to be mindful of consequences.”
Ta’Kai Perkins, one of Cooke’s student assistants, said the difference at New Harmony is obvious.
“At my old school, during lunch — it went from K through eighth — there were multiple bags of trash a day,” Pekins said. “We barely fill up one trash can every day.”
The school composts roughly 750 pounds of food waste each month, Cooke said. That’s trash that would otherwise end up in landfills, contributing to climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
But its composting program is about to end. New Harmony’s board of directors voted last year to surrender its charter when it expires in June and shut down. New Harmony, which received a D-rating from the state in 2025 and has posted lower test scores in recent years, wouldn’t have qualified for an extension under the state’s renewal standards.
Composting across the city
Cooke’s fellow “sustainability tsarina,” Simone Cifuentes, started New Harmony’s composting program in 2023.
A California native, Cifuentes learned to compost in third grade at school.
“I do it at home, I’m kind of obsessive about it,” said Cifuentes, who teaches several science classes.
Getting students at New Harmony used to composting — something that was totally new to them — took time, she said.
“The expectation is they’ll do it if they know how. It’s about education,” she said.
Now that composting is part of the school’s culture and students know what they’re doing and why, Cifuentes said she and Cooke are more hands-off. She likened them to police on the neutral ground, just watching.
New Orleans doesn’t offer curbside compost pickup, so the school pays for a private service that turns the waste into soil. Two companies in the city work with a handful of schools.
As it is, the city barely recycles. Only about 2% of household waste doesn’t end up in a landfill. That’s extraordinarily low, even compared to other Southern cities.
City officials recently turned down millions of dollars in federal funds to expand recycling efforts, citing additional costs the city says it couldn’t cover on its own due to its ongoing budget crisis.
Cifuentes credits New Harmony’s administration with making sustainability a priority and providing the necessary budget to cover additional costs, such as purchasing reusable, compostable dishes and silverware to further reduce waste.
Some other public and private schools in the city compost, but at different volumes. Samuel J. Green Charter School, a FirstLine school in Uptown, composts student lunch scraps, but not kitchen waste.
On par with New Harmony is the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls school also in Uptown. The school started composting a few years ago as a top-down initiative from the school’s headmaster at the time, who was Canadian, said Cherie Tegre, the school’s sustainability coordinator and middle school Spanish teacher.
Like New Harmony, its composting program has expanded each year and is now schoolwide. All of the school’s 800 students, as young as preschool, compost, diverting 2,800 pounds of food waste from landfills each month, Tegre said.
“Part of our value system is taking action on knowledge,” Tegre said, citing the science of climate change.
Connecting the dots
At New Harmony, composting isn’t just something that happens in the cafeteria; it’s part of the school’s curriculum.
Cooke and Cifuentes have worked it into the classes they teach — world geography, environmental science and biology — and have helped other teachers do the same. Students take regular field trips, including to the site where their compost is turned into soil.
In Cooke’s classroom, there’s a homemade banner with a cypress tree that says “Protect what you love.” The L is shaped like Louisiana.
During a compost program check-in, Cooke asked a group of students if they remembered why the school composts. One said to keep stuff out of landfills. Another mentioned carbon and climate change. Cifuentes jumped in.
“You know how, like when you pass gas, it’s kind of stinky?” she asked.
That stinky gas is methane, not carbon, Cifuentes explained. It’s what’s largely released when food decays without oxygen, like in our bodies — and in landfills.
“That gas, depends on where it is in the atmosphere, but it's up to 40 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon,” she said. “So it’s actually so much worse.”
In composting, food waste is deliberately spread out and mixed to introduce oxygen, said Cifuentes, which cuts down the amount of methane produced. That’s why composting is better for the environment.
They finished with some math.
They multiplied the number of pounds New Harmony composts each month by 10 to get a total for the school year — 7,500 pounds.
“It’s kind of hard to take a number that big and make it meaningful,” Cook said, so she offered an alternative.
“I did some math and wouldn’t you know it, that is the equivalent of nine teenage manatees and just one little, baby manatee.”
She encouraged students to do the same, and they calculated the number of alligators, Jimi Hendrix records and utahraptors — a dinosaur with feathers like a chicken — worth of waste the school had diverted.
As the school wraps up its final year, Cifuentes wants students to hold onto this lesson and others meant to empower them to make sustainable choices.
“It sucks to be at a school that is no longer, but had a lot of great ideas and have it all be ending,” she said.
She hopes students who may not have been exposed to composting without New Harmony will keep doing it on their own.
“ So tell your friends,” she told them as they left. “Try to bring composting to your next school.”
