Meet the Prefects: Selah Hess

by: Ava Honeycutt

Selah doing dishes, photo credit: Tessa Higgins

This week I interviewed Selah Hess, the sustainability prefect about her jobs and contribution to the community. Selah works in the dining room and kitchen, taking out the trash, composting, washing, and sorting all the school's dirty dishes. There are a lot of random jobs that take place in the job area such as cleaning up the piles of bread that build up by the sandwich station and even wiping red sauce off of the kitchen doors. She also makes sure the Wooster community has clean dishes to eat with every day.

Selah hopes that the area will teach people the importance of keeping a shared space clean so future job captains won't have to get their hands quite as dirty and to have more job areas using washable rags to reduce paper waste. She wants the community to comprehend the dish-sorting system and to better appreciate the hard work that goes into the dining room and kitchen as well. This leads her to dream for everyone to always bring their dishes in and leave the place better than they found it. Not only does she hope that everyone will be able to do their part for the community, but she also wants the job to be based more on keeping the school green by emphasizing composting, recycling, and using rags instead of paper towels to take the steps to make our school better for the environment. We began composting very many years ago. First, it started with big green bowls at the lunch tables, but then it moved to big buckets in the kitchen. In these buckets, uneaten food, liquids, and compostable napkins are all mixed together and put into big trash bins that are taken away to be used as compost.

Sustainability is one of the most important jobs at our school, as without her our dining experience would be much different. She wants to make sure everything is done correctly, but while making it fun. Oftentimes you'll hear music coming from the kitchen as she works with her team cleaning up the dishes for the next wave. Selah has been working very hard to make the sustainability job area more enjoyable and I think she has done that extremely well.