Want To Green Your School This Year? Here’s 7 Easy Ways

Our kids spend a least 6 hours a day, 180 days a year, at school. Sending them off to a safe, chemical free school is as important as establishing  a clean, toxin free home. Helping your local school with their efforts to go green is worth your time and energy and will set a wonderful example for your children.

Parents can make a difference. Getting involved in your child’s education doesn’t stop with homework help and helping out with fundraisers. Parental involvement in greening up our schools can go a long way in improving the learning environment for our children while protecting Earth’s precious natural habitats. Here is a list of 7 easy ways you and your children can start to green your school this year!

7 Steps to Green Your School

 

1. Establish A Green Team or Eco-Committee

The Green Team is the core of the Green Schools process, both organizing and directing activities at the school. Consisting of the stakeholders of the school environment – students, teachers, janitors, facilities managers, parents and school board members – the Green Team is democratic and can be run by the students themselves. Whatever the type of school or age group, student involvement in the committee is essential. This group can be charged with coordinating many of the greening activities, making recommendations to relevant school decision-makers, and facilitate communication among and actions by the whole school community.

 

2. Adopt An Environmental Vision Statement or Planet Pledge

Each school produces its own vision statement, setting out what the students are striving to achieve. The Environmental Vision Statement or Planet Pledge is displayed in various places within the school and is recognized by the students and other school community members as a statement of beliefs and intents. This statement is often in the words of students, and can be an inspiring classroom, art, or school-wide assembly project. Such statements can also be accompanied by a resolution from the school board, Parent Teacher Association, the Green Team, or other school bodies.

 

3. Conduct A School Environmental Survey or Audit

To identify priorities for action, begin with conducting a review of the environmental impact of the school. Students are involved in this work from assessing the level of waste from school lunch to checking the building for inefficiencies such as leaky taps or electric equipment left on overnight. The school and the Green Team can work with local organizations, businesses, or other resource people or experts during the review.  These audits can be fun and really help educate the school community about the health and environmental impacts of the school.

 

4. Create A Green School Action Plan

Use the results of your environmental survey or audit to identify priorities of the key areas where you want to make change and create an action plan. It is important to set realistic and achievable targets to improve environmental performance at the school so kids and adults can take pride in tangible accomplishments in the short term. And it is important to set long-term, inspiring and challenging targets to move beyond the status quo and foster greater environmental improvements. The action plan could involve and promote, for example, a school recycling program; eco-friendly, non-toxic cleaning materials; carpooling; energy conservation like turning off lights, computer monitors and printers; or a school garden.

 

5. Monitor and Evaluate Progress

The Green Team, students, or other school community members can assist with monitoring and evaluating progress on the priorities in the action plan. This could involve conducting an annual environmental audit to monitor levels of waste, recycling, energy use, purchases of environmentally-preferable products, and financial savings and/or costs. The information from the monitoring is needed to ensure that progress towards the goals and targets is made and that the action plan is modified, if necessary. It also ensures that environmental education is an on-going process in the school, since students can be responsible for the annual audits. The basic data collected over time can show the waste, pollution, and energy avoided – big motivators for people to continue the efforts.

 

6. Integrate Greening into the Curriculum

Greening activities can be integrated into existing curricula in science, art, humanities, math, language arts, or electives. Using the school as a hands-on laboratory offers opportunities for real-world problem-solving. Students can undertake study of themes such as energy, water, forests, toxic pollution, and waste. The whole school should be involved in practical initiatives – for example, saving water, recycling materials and saving energy. Outdoor education, and time spent in nature locally – whether the schoolyard, a park, or a field trip – is a critical component of a hands-on, place-based, experiential education. Where environmental education is not part of the regular curriculum, recommendations can be made by the Green Team as to how these themes can be incorporated.

 

7. Inform, Involve, and Celebrate!

Recognizing, communicating, reflecting on, and celebrating achievements are critical components of a Green School! Greening programs can often unify the whole school and strengthen community relations. Green Schools are encouraged to partner with external organizations from the community to benefit from their experience and expertise.

 

In some schools, environmental consultants have offered to take part in the environmental review process. Many local government agencies and utilities often offer free advice on energy, recycling, and hazardous waste management. Green Schools are also encouraged to consider the wider community when preparing action plans – for example, schools could offer to be the local recycling point or to be a drop-off for Community Supported Agriculture boxes. Some schools get involved with clean-up or habitat restoration at nearby parks or share their experiences in other ways.

 

A communication and publicity program keeps the school and the community informed of progress through classroom displays, school assemblies, newsletters, or other press coverage. Annual Earth Day celebrations – organized around April 20 – can offer an opportunity to showcase actions taken by the school and bring together the school and wider community.

 

Let’s teach our kids different habits to help the earth. Here are just a couple ways you can make a difference.

Pack a waste-free lunch– Eliminate plastic bags, plastic utensils, disposable containers, paper napkins and those brown paper bags. Instead, use reusable lunchbox, reusable drink containers, cloth napkins and silverware. You could save up to $250 a year and as much weight in waste as the average nine-year old.

Carpooling– Carpool, and save time and money. On a typical day, the average mother with school-age children spends sixty-six minutes driving— taking more than five trips to and from home and covering twenty-nine miles. If more moms carpooled, it would save them all that time and gas driving.

Pencils– Choose pencils made from recycled materials and those packed in lightweight and recyclable packaging. Pencils can be made from all sorts of things that would otherwise end up in our waste stream- like furniture, old money, and paper. Pencils account for about $121 million worth of purchases every year, and all could potentially be made from recycled materials.

We want to know about what your school is doing to Go Green. Share your ideas below in the Comments section