Development of a School-based Intervention Program for Waste Management in a Rural School in Northern Thailand

Waste management is a challenging environmental and public health issue in Thailand and throughout the world.

This study aimed to develop a school-based intervention program for waste management in one rural school in Northern Thailand.

A specific research and development method was employed to develop the school-based intervention program. This consisted of three steps: 1) a problem and need assessment step, wherein 38 key stakeholders associated with the school, including a school administrator, teachers, students, a food vendor, and a janitor, were interviewed to understand the existing waste management problems and intervention components; 2) an intervention development step, involving students, teachers, and researchers who worked together to design an intervention program based on the perspectives of the stakeholders; 3) an intervention implementation and evaluation step, wherein students, teachers, and researchers implemented the developed intervention program in the school and evaluated the appropriateness of the program using an online questionnaire. Qualitative data were analyzed using content analysis, while one-way ANOVA was used to compare waste management knowledge among students at the pre-, right after-, and one-month-after implementation stages.

The school-based waste management intervention program involved four action plans: 1) empowering peer leadership; 2) supporting peer-led activities; 3) setting up enough bins; and 4) promoting extracurricular activities by peer leaders involving teachers and community leaders. Following the implementation of the program, students demonstrated greater waste management knowledge immediately after the intervention (p< .05) and at the one-month follow-up point (p< .01).

This developed school-based intervention program could improve waste management knowledge among adolescents in rural schools.