Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the principal at PS 289 in Brooklyn began purchasing bottled water for students and staff when in-person classes restarted.

“There were plastic bottles all over the place so I started collecting them,” veteran teacher and Chapter Leader Katrina Thomas said. “My thinking was that one man’s trash could be another man’s treasure.”

What to do with that treasure became clear to her in the summer of 2024 during a trip to Ghana with one of her former college professors.

“We discovered that small children in Kumasi didn’t get to go to school because there was no building,” said Thomas, a special education teacher since 1997 who has worked since 2008 at PS 289 in Crown Heights where she grew up. “And that’s when I realized we could use the bottles to try to get a building built for these children.”

She contacted the school’s headmistress to learn what was needed, then went back to PS 289 and approached the 5th-grade teachers about making the initiative their classes’ community service project.

The whole school participated, and the school custodians provided receptacles for each floor to collect the empty bottles. “Some students had their parents bring in bottles,” Thomas said, “and I spoke to retired colleagues and my neighbor. Before long, we had bags of bottles.”

And, one 5-cent-bottle-recycling-fee at a time, money started to accumulate. “I called it the Bottles Building Bridges Campaign,” Thomas said.

Thomas “exemplifies teaching that extends beyond the classroom and encourages civic responsibility and service to others,” said school counselor Danilova Pierre. “Many of the students were genuinely surprised to learn how a simple action, such as recycling, could contribute to such a meaningful outcome.”

In the first round, $90 was collected. Thomas decided to use her own money to increase each round’s profit by 200%, bringing that total to $270. By the time the 5th-grade class graduated last spring, about $3,500 was raised between the bottle money and Thomas’ personal contributions.

That was enough to build a three-classroom kindergarten building, complete with internet access, which was recently completed in the town of Besease outside Kumasi, Ghana. Thomas on Jan. 16 attended a virtual ceremony where she was honored for making it happen.

And she’s not finished. She is planning to start a foundation, with funds from corporate donors, to continue making improvements at the school. “I’d like to add a playground, educational toys and supplies,” said Thomas. “The excitement of other people has encouraged me to keep this going.”