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Computer off? Check.

Good job recycling? Not quite. There were some aluminum cans in the same container as mixed paper.

Alvarez, 9, a third-grade student, filled out an orange slip, reminding the classroom’s teacher to recycle. The slip said ‘‘Save Energy, This Means You.”

‘‘It was all good except she didn’t recycle properly,” said team member Tigist Tadesse, 11, a fourth-grade student.

Students at Oak View have taken environmental issues into their own hands. The SERT (School Eco Response Team) Club, which meets on Thursdays with about 20 students, empties the school’s recycling bins and monitors energy use in classrooms. Each student has a job: he or she pushes bins of recycled paper and cans from room to room, dumps recyclable material into those bins, or inspects each room to make sure people are saving energy.

The club also makes posters to remind classmates and teachers to recycle and conserve energy, and helped put lights with lower-watt bulbs in the computer lab.

‘‘It’s so you can save the environment and save electricity,” Alvarez said.

‘‘And you can save trees and save more paper,” said Celeste Orellana, 8, a third-grade student.

The work the children are doing is important, said club sponsor Evan Bernstein, a staff development teacher at the school. Not only do the students learn about the environment, they also play a role in helping preserve it.

And the work is effective. Teachers don’t like it when they get orange slips, Bernstein said, and usually make a better effort to turn off lights and recycle paper and cans. Additionally, he said, many teachers have ordered desk lamps to use at the end of the day instead of their overhead lights, something they were able to do through the club.

Children outside the club also are becoming more conscious about the environment, Bernstein said. He recalled a day he left his classroom briefly without turning off the lights. When he came back, two children were standing outside the door, waiting to inform him he was wasting energy.

Efforts are being made countywide to reduce energy consumption in schools as part of the SERT program. Schools practice environmental stewardship and energy-saving techniques to win quarterly awards.

At Silver Spring International Middle School, for instance, the school replaced 32-watt light bulbs with 25-watt light bulbs, and reduced the number of bulbs in overhead light fixtures from four to three, said Jim Stufft, one of the school system’s SERT facilitators.

‘‘That’s going to be a tremendous savings,” he said, adding the computer lab is also using floor lamps — much like Oak View’s — which save energy.

‘‘Almost all schools are doing it,” Stufft said, estimating that by July 1, about 80 percent of the county’s 200 public schools will be using lower-watt bulbs. Churchill High School piloted the light bulb project in March. Schools that switch their light bulbs can get rebates and earn money for the school to use for other things.

The new bulbs cost just under $4, while the old bulbs were just under $1. But the energy savings is so great, he said, that the bulbs pay for themselves in just a couple months, particularly if schools also focus on energy-saving behavior, like turning off computers and lights after use.

Two-thirds of electricity use in schools is from overhead lights and things that are plugged in, Stufft said. The other third is from heating and air conditioning.

‘‘Two-thirds of electricity use is controlled directly by the users themselves,” he said.

Go green

To learn more about the school system’s Green Schools program, go to www.greenschoolsfocus.org.