San Francisco third graders clean campus for Earth Day, inspired by Hoppers

Garbage bags, gloves and a burst of third-grade energy turned the St. Thomas More Catholic School campus into a lesson in civic duty as students fanned out to pick up litter around the San Francisco school. What might have looked like a simple cleanup became a hands-on civics class about responsibility, stewardship and how small choices shape a neighborhood.

The Earth Day effort was inspired by Pixar and Disney’s new film Hoppers and coordinated through Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots program, which connects children with nature and pushes them to design their own conservation projects. At St. Thomas More, the work was concrete: students spotted trash, collected it and talked about how everyday habits affect the environment around their school.

Nine-year-old Benicio Padilla gave the clearest measure of the morning’s impact. He said the class picked up about 30 pieces of trash, “a lot of it small.” That detail landed with the force of the lesson itself, showing how a few wrappers, scraps and bits of litter can add up quickly on a city campus.

The cleanup carried extra weight in San Francisco, the city where the first Earth Day was held in 1970 after Sen. Gaylord Nelson called for environmental teach-ins on college campuses nationwide. This year’s Earth Day theme, “Our Power, Our Planet,” framed the holiday as a reminder that local action still matters, especially in places like schoolyards, sidewalks and corner blocks where children see the effects of litter every day.

The educational work also fits into a broader city tradition. The San Francisco Environment Department says it provides free, year-round environmental education for PK-12 public and independent schools, using hands-on learning to connect climate action and sustainability to students’ own communities. San Francisco Unified School District’s Sustainability Office says it has been fostering a culture of sustainability since 2008.

St. Thomas More Catholic School, part of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, serves Transitional Kindergarten through 8th grade and sits squarely in that neighborhood-school tradition. The campus cleanup showed how quickly an Earth Day lesson can move beyond awareness and into action when students are given trash bags, a patch of ground and a clear task.

Roots & Shoots says Disney and Jane Goodall are teaming up around Hoppers and the 30th anniversary of the Disney Conservation Fund to inspire 100,000 young people to make a difference for animals and their communities. The program’s U.S. mini-grant effort has awarded more than 500 grants since 2014, a sign that these small school projects can keep growing after the last piece of litter is gone.