Greening Our Schools
I recently attended and presented at the first Green Schools National Conference held in Minneapolis and it was inspirational to see the broad spectrum of green school activities that are happening nationally. Project Learning Tree GreenSchools! is a national program of the American Forest Foundation that combines environmental education, service-learning, and leadership opportunities for students to reduce the ecological footprint of their school, and turn their school into a model GreenSchool.
This fall at the Kansas City and Baltimore National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Regional Conferences, Project Learning Tree teamed with local students and teachers to present PLT GreenSchools!
stories to conference participants. The “Youth Voice” was a crowd pleaser at both conferences as students shared their PowerPoint presentations on what action projects they had completed at their schools over the last 12 months.
The school in Kansas City was Allen Village Charter School that shared their new recycling program and the start of their new garden program. In Baltimore, Benjamin Franklin High School students discussed their energy conservation program, their courtyard clean-up, and their mentoring program with a neighboring elementary school. These presentations clearly showed the power of youth voice and the leadership of these students. Each program was attended by more than 20 teachers from different schools around the country.
The PLT GreenSchools! program is growing exponentially! Nearly 700 schools nationwide have registered to become part of the program. On Tuesday, I completed another regional training, this time in Newark, NJ, with 12 teachers and 23 student leaders from 4 schools. NJ schools lack any type of comprehensive recycling program which prompted our GreenSchool students to initiate a Student Recycling petition at the training.
PLT’s GreenSchools! program provides a blueprint for teachers, students, school administrators, parents, and community members to engage together in creating a more green and healthy learning environment. Across the country, elementary, middle, and high school students are learning to use their knowledge and skills from science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses to address challenges at their school.
They are forming “green teams” to investigate and reduce their school’s environmental footprint—and save their schools money! Student-driven investigations and their ensuing action projects grow students’ leadership skills, and give students a sense of empowerment and ownership of the projects they lead to green their school.
Last December, for example, one of our Washington, DC GreenSchools, Paul Middle School, participated in a live distance-learning session with the Will Steger Foundation that connected them with college students on the ground at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. The students shared their experiences using PLT’s GreenSchools! Investigations and their ideas for reducing energy use at their school as a practical way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. Check out what some other students at PLT GreenSchools are doing on our website, www.pltgreenschools.org.
