| |
|
|
|
Question: What is being done at your school to encourage sustainability?
There are many ways for your school to ensure it is sustainable: financial, environmental, demographic, programmatic and global. What is being done at your school?
In every issue of Dialogue Magazine, we ask a question to the independent educator community to spark dialogue about the issue's theme. We've already heard from many schools and want to feature your story. Some of the comments posted below will be selected to be published in the Open House section of the print version of Dialogue magazine on "The Sustainability of Private Schools." Please supply your email so we can contact you about publication.
Open House submissions should be between 80 and 100 words in length. The deadline for Open House submissions has been extended until Thursday, February 11, 2010.
|
|
|
Andrea Aster
|
|
Associate Communications Director, Upper Canada College
How many words would you like and by when? We do a TON, including our new arena which is heated by a geothermal coil.
|
|
| |
|
Karen Readey
|
|
Director of Communications, Midland School
Midland School – Educating for Sustainability for 8 Decades
Recipient of a 2009 Governor’s Award for Environmental and Economic Leadership, California’s highest environmental honor
Midland is living out the vision of Paul and Louise Squibb, who in 1932 built an educational model around distinguishing between needs and wants within a rigorous college preparatory curriculum. Midland is taking tangible steps towards a sustainable future by producing food, clean energy, and most importantly informed young citizens.
Midland’s environmental initiatives:
* Make the relationship between human, resource, and waste transparent – food, energy, water, heat.
* Through our Jobs program, students serve meals, clean the kitchen and dishes, manage the trash and recycling stream, and clean the common spaces. Our 12th grade Job Heads train and mentor underclassmen in these community responsibilities. Everyone has a job, and everyone is needed.
* Students build daily communal fires to heat shower water. Impacts are localized, and consequences linked to actions.
* Our 10th graders annually install a photovoltaic array that helps meet campus electricity needs, and then become community teachers at Santa Barbara’s Earth Day. This annual incremental approach is affordable, reaches all our students, and moves us always towards climate neutrality, without paralysis.
* We tend a large organic garden and pastures that provide produce and grass-fed beef to our dining hall.
* Scraps from every meal are taken to the pigs or garden compost. Students understand the tight nutrient cycling in this closed-loop food system.
* Instill knowledge and love of the land.
* Our field-based 9th grade science course on California’s topography, geology, ecology, and history, our 9th grade orientation class that leads students to become responsible community members starting in the garden, our outdoor leadership class, and other courses use Midland’s land as a classroom.
* A conservation easement with the Santa Barbara Land Trust and the Trust for Public Land forever preserved 2,727 acres of Midland’s 2,860-acre property.
* Simplify
* Strip away clutter, comfort, media distractions, and imposing buildings to allow students the space to find their strength within.
At Midland, students learn viscerally that we live in a world with limits. Working to meet one’s basic needs fosters treating resources as precious. Students learn they are in the cycle of life and materials. At Midland, the fruits and the waste of our labors are right in front of us, where we’re more likely to take responsibility than we would by just flipping a switch to get what we need. Distinguishing between needs and wants is the starting point of a meaningful conservation ethic.
|
|
| |
|
Clayton Johnston
|
|
Director of Admissions, Brentwood College
At Brentwood, our commitment to sustainability extends beyond student activities, guests lecturers, and academic classes. The development mandate for our oceanfront campus has led us to weave our passion for environment right into the very fibre of our buildings in order to protect our beautiful surroundings. This March we are opening our new dining hall and student services centre which has been built with a minimum of 75% waste diversion from landfills. Designed to meet LEED gold standards, this building includes 18 Energy Conservation Measures such as a geothermal heat exchanger placed in the ocean, grey water heat recovery from the laundry and kitchen facilities, on-site bioswales to naturally filter the parking areas, and reduced water and heat consumption. We invite you to visit our campus and learn how an independent boarding school can provide an outstanding education for your child in an ecologically sound environment. http://www.brentwood.bc.ca/
|
|
| |
|
Lisa Raleigh
|
|
Director of Communications, Colorado Rocky Mountain School
For more than 55 years, Colorado Rocky Mountain School has practiced environmental stewardship and a commitment to sustainability. This interest in the environment and sustainability is a thread that runs throughout the school. From the academic classroom setting to the extensive active program, CRMS students, faculty, and staff are constantly looking for opportunities to implement and explore sustainable options both on the campus and beyond the school’s fences.
In support of this long-standing environmental commitment, the CRMS Board of Trustees adopted an Environmental Statement of Purpose in June, 2006.
“The Colorado Rocky Mountain School recognizes its measurable impact on the environment and its responsibility as an educational institution to be a leader in teaching others how to be better stewards of the Earth and our natural resources. We embrace our role in environmental stewardship by promoting environmental awareness through local action and global thinking throughout the CRMS community. We encourage conservation, recycling, and other sustainable practices in our daily decision-making processes, and shall take into account, in the building and operations of the School, all appropriate environmental, social, and economic concerns. At its most basic level, sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”
|
|
| |
|
Kirsten Bohl
|
|
Publicist, Olney Friends School
How does an environmentally aware, independent Quaker high school -– with an economically diverse global student body, situated on 350 acres in rural southeastern Ohio in the Appalachian foothills, with a college preparatory curriculum and a working farm and garden –- evolve into something larger than itself? The board is embarked on a visioning process to achieve long-term financial sustainability. We, like others, believe that educating young people and adults to live in harmony with the planet is the key on which we must focus. We will build on our rich history of hands-on environmental science education to embrace a wider population.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Published in:
The Sustainability of Private Schools
2010
|
|
Other articles by Our Kids Publications
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
more articles from this issue:
Using avatars to experience the world
Understand your school’s real niche
Save money while making your school shine
Experiencing the world from the classroom
Migrating interactive courses online
Ideas to keep tuition affordable
Montessori teaches about remaining true
The transition to a sustainable future
Seven school leadership characteristics
Making the right choices during tough times
|
|
|
forward this page to a friend
comments
Share!